Publications

La Pubblica Amministrazione rappresenta uno dei pilastri fondamentali del sistema paese, cui contribuisce erogando servizi, regolando sistemi economici e sociali, promuovendo politiche di sviluppo, garantendo beni comunitari fondamentali. In coerenza con la mission centenaria dell'Università Cattolica, il progetto FuturAP vuole, da un lato, analizzare lo stato dell'arte delle Amministrazioni Pubbliche rispetto ai principali driver di cambiamento, portando in evidenza buone pratiche e sperimentazioni innovative; dall'altro, riflettere sulle sfide che attendono il settore pubblico nel prossimo futuro, oggi segnato dagli impatti sociali ed economici della pandemia da Covid-19. Il presente rapporto FuturAP vuole quindi contribuire al dibattito non solo accademico, ma aperto a istituzioni e agli attori economici e sociali sulle sfide che appunto attendono le Pubbliche amministrazioni.

Virtually all enterprises are regulated in a host of ways and regulation is crucial not merely to economic success but to protecting consumer, worker, environmental, and an array of other interests. Regulation, though, is often seen negatively: as a tiresome interference with entrepreneurial activity. This negative vision is unhelpful in addressing business and other needs for productive forms of regulation. Taming the Corporation offers an alternative, positive, vision of regulation. It stresses the role of good regulation in allowing businesses to flourish, serve markets effectively, and respect broader interests. This paves the way for more productive regulatory designs. It looks at the characteristics of good regulation and provides businesses, consumers, and citizens with the arguments that they need when they push for regulatory controls that serve their needs. Understandings of regulation are also served by looking at the potentially positive roles of control strategies ranging from ‘command laws’ to ‘nudges’. The book, in addition, provides a more detailed examination of three key regulatory challenges in the modern world: regulating for sustainability; addressing global warming; and controlling digital platforms. Taming the Corporation offers a new vision of regulation—as a positive way to steer corporate power in productive and useful directions. It turns the traditional regulation discussion on its head. Regulatory theories are discussed but the book also uses numerous case examples to illustrate and address real life challenges.

Stakeholder participation in regulatory processes has become increasingly common. The literature on citizen, customer and consumer participation in regulation shows a rise in these types of engagement, based primarily on individual case studies. However, we lack a solid empirical base for the discussion of this trend. This paper asks to what extent and why this rise in participation in regulatory policy-making occurs, creating a cross-sector, cross-country map of participatory regulation. The research is based on a quantitative, dictionary-based analysis of regulatory agencies' annual reports from 1998 to 2017 (n = 781). The findings show a rise in the use of terms related to participation over time, with the notable exceptions of financial and environmental regulators. These terms are most commonly used in EU level agencies, in Australia and France, while being rarely used in the German and Austrian cases. Our analysis shows that polity level variation is a key driver of how regulators use terms related to participation, and argues that such participation is less common in countries in which stakeholder participation is carried out at the national level through centralized corporatist institutions.

The Justice Department released a report today on the need for Congress to update and improve the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the 74-year-old statute setting forth the procedures agencies must follow when regulating individuals, businesses, non-profits, and state and local government entities. The report, entitled Modernizing the Administrative Procedure Act, discusses how the administrative state has developed in ways not foreseen by the APA in 1946, how the APA might be legislatively improved, and how this Administration’s improvements to agencies’ regulatory processes could inform modernizing the APA. The Justice Department, which significantly shaped the original APA, hopes that the ideas and insights discussed in the report will encourage and inform much needed action by Congress to modernize the APA. The report released today is based on a summit held at the Justice Department on December 6, 2019. The summit brought together leading regulatory practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to discuss how best to reform the APA, which remains largely unchanged since its enactment in 1946. These experts offered a variety of ideas, from a variety of perspectives, on how Congress could reform the APA so that regulation better serves the needs of the American people. “This report aims to disseminate the many good ideas for modernizing the APA offered by participants in the summit,” said Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen. “The Justice Department is eager to build on the many improvements the Trump Administration has already made to the regulatory process by working with leaders in Congress to modernize the APA.” “This important report contributes to the ongoing dialogue about how to make the American administrative system less burdensome, more accountable to the people, and more respectful of the rights of Americans,” said Paul Ray, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “It follows on a number of critical reforms by President Trump and is essential reading for anyone who shares a commitment to vindicating the principles of limited, accountable government and the rule of law in today’s world.”

Financial regulators in the United States have come under increased pressure to improve the economic analysis that informs their regulatory decisions. Economic theory and empirical analysis both suggest that economic analysis of financial regulations should be no more difficult than economic analysis of other types of regulations. Financial regulatory agencies can produce useful economic analysis to inform regulatory decisions if they keep three principles in mind: (1) Focus on regulatory impact analysis (RIA), not just benefit-cost analysis (BCA); (2) The analysis is not the decision; and (3) Build institutional capacity to support objective analysis.