The precautionary principle and regulatory impact assessment: on the need for initial screening of hazards in regulatory work with examples from transport

Lena Nerhagen (), Sara Forsstedt and Karin Edvardsson
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Lena Nerhagen: CTS - Centre for Transport Studies Stockholm (KTH and VTI), Postal: Centrum för Transportstudier (CTS), Teknikringen 10, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
Sara Forsstedt: The Swedish Transport Agency
Karin Edvardsson: The Swedish Transport Agency

No 2018:14, Working papers in Transport Economics from CTS - Centre for Transport Studies Stockholm (KTH and VTI)

Abstract: To achieve effective regulation, the OECD and the European Commission recommend the use of regulatory impact assessment (RIA). The full RIA process has however not been implemented in Sweden. There is for example a lack of established practices at the national level for the analysis of risk in regulatory work. Instead, soft law in the form of management by objective systems is guiding transport and environmental policy. These systems were introduced in the end of the 1990s following the international discussion on the precautionary principle. According to findings in other countries, policy making based on the precautionary principle may result in unexpected and unwanted consequences and therefore, based on a literature review and an assessment of current practices in transport regulation in Sweden, we suggest the use of an initial screening of hazards in regulatory work. We also apply the proposed method to four transport related case studies to illustrate how an initial assessment can provide the basis for an informed discussion on what hazards to counteract with regulation and on what grounds.

Keywords: precautionary principle; risk assessment; hazards; regulatory impact assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2018-09-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-tre
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