Does (better) regulation really matter? Examining public financial management legislation in Greece

Georgia Kontogeorga

European Journal of Law and Economics, 2017, vol. 43, issue 1, No 7, 153-166

Abstract: Abstract Greece is thought to suffer from weak implementation of the law, including weak legislative monitoring and enforcement, a situation that undermines confidence in the rule of law. In recent years, increasing importance has been given to better regulation, namely the improvement of the quality of legislation with regards to state functioning. The purpose of this article is to examine the contribution of better regulation in the compliance of public entities with budgetary laws and regulations. The survey was the first such study to be conducted in Greece, and distributed questionnaires to auditors of the Hellenic Court of Audit, which is the Supreme Audit Institution charged with the authority to conduct external auditing of public entities and their executives. The survey results have confirmed the sense of weakness mentioned above, as most respondents considered the existing legislative framework of public financial management to be unclear, a situation that deterred compliance. Improved law design is expected to ameliorate compliance by public sector bodies, which apparently violate the law more due to its ambiguity and complexity rather than to any deliberate intention. Therefore, non-compliance should be better addressed through simplification of regulations rather than coercive enforcement.

Keywords: Compliance; Better regulation; Public financial management system; Greece (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H7 K00 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10657-016-9534-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:ejlwec:v:43:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s10657-016-9534-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10657

DOI: 10.1007/s10657-016-9534-3

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Jürgen Georg Backhaus, Giovanni B. Ramello and Alain Marciano

More articles in European Journal of Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().