Cost of regulation and impact of EU membership on policy enforcement

Phedon Nicolaides

Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy, 2013, vol. 48, issue 6, 371-377

Abstract: Recent public debate on the costs and benefits of EU membership has focused more on the costs and less on the benefits. This paper explores the benefits from improved regulatory or policy implementation and enforcement. If actual regulatory enforcement differs from the socially optimal level, membership of a regional bloc that strengthens accountability mechanisms can improve the quality of implemented regulation. However, if the regional bloc tends to over-regulate, the overall increase in the regulatory burden, together with strengthened accountability, will move a country farther away from its socially optimal state. Membership of the EU is beneficial for countries with weak enforcement institutions, but it may worsen the welfare of countries with strong regulatory institutions. Infringement statistics indicate that no member state of the EU has a perfect record in implementation and enforcement. Copyright ZBW and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10272-013-0480-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:intere:v:48:y:2013:i:6:p:371-377

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.de/orders.htm

DOI: 10.1007/s10272-013-0480-9

Access Statistics for this article

Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy is currently edited by Christian Breuer

More articles in Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy from Springer, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().