Evaluating the benefits and costs of regulatory reforms: What questions need to be asked?

Stuart Shapiro

Evaluation and Program Planning, 2008, vol. 31, issue 3, 223-230

Abstract: In 1984, Portney argued that "[w]e should scrutinize proposed reforms of the rulemaking process every bit as carefully as the regulations that process produces." In the 23 years since then, the regulatory process on the federal level has been continuously reformed by statute, by executive order, and by directives from the OMB. Despite the extensive debate on the need for these reforms, there has been very little analysis of the reforms themselves. This paper updates Portney's work on analyzing cost-benefit analysis and expands it to evaluate reforms of the regulatory process. I use as my primary example the recent peer-review guidelines issued by OMB. I argue that we may have reached a point of diminishing returns in regulatory reforms, that the peer-review guidelines likely have costs that exceed their benefits, and that further regulatory reforms merit closer evaluation.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149-7189(08)00017-7
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:epplan:v:31:y:2008:i:3:p:223-230

Access Statistics for this article

Evaluation and Program Planning is currently edited by Jonathan A. Morell

More articles in Evaluation and Program Planning from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().