FINANCIAL TIMES: Populists push to roll back rules

Description

In a 2012 OECD expert paper, David Parker of Cranfield University and Colin Kirkpatrick of the University of Manchester reviewed the state of academic knowledge and concluded that there were large gaps in our understanding of the effects of regulation policy.

Their conclusions are not a counsel of despair: there are some results that seem reasonably well-supported, including that regulation can stop new companies entering a market, and that there are clear benefits to conducting an impact assessment before introducing a new rule. But it is clear that the impact of regulation is typically “context specific”. The effect of any rule can vary depending on a country’s economic and political structures, and on its other regulatory and legal requirements.