Regulations are often made during times of uncertainty and/or with haste in responding to an emergency of some kind. Ex post evaluation allows policymakers to assess whether regulations have led to the intended results that were espoused when they were first made. This recognises that all regulations are, to some extent, experiments and that some experiments fail, and others need adjusting, before the desired results materialise. As a core component of any regulatory management system, ex post evaluation is ultimately about ensuring that regulations maximise community well-being over time.
This report provides guidance on the key elements of a sound ex post evaluation system. It illustrates practical elements of ex post evaluation that policymakers should follow when designing ex post evaluation systems, as well as how evaluations themselves can be conducted. As such, this report is a useful tool for countries embarking on ex post evaluations as well as for entities responsible for conducting evaluations in practice.

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.”

When the going gets tough, the tough get going: How economic regulators bolster the resilience of network industries in response to the COVID-19 crisis - oecd.org

This policy brief was developed by the Secretariat of the OECD Network of Economic Regulators (NER) and is based on examples of practice submitted by members of the NER. It reviews emergency measures taken by economic regulators during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure continuity of services in network sectors, as well as to adjust regulatory practices and adapt governance arrangements.

This study provides a survey of research that uses cross-country comparisons to examine how
economic regulation affects growth. Studies in the peer-reviewed literature tend to rely on either
World Bank or Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development measures of regulation. Those studies seem to reflect a consensus that entry regulation and anticompetitive product and labor market regulations are generally harmful to growth. The results from this cross-country research, taken in conjunction with economic theory as well as other countryspecific studies of economic regulation, support the hypothesis that economic regulation tends to reduce welfare in competitive markets. Given the continued use of certain types of economic regulation, the findings may offer important lessons for policymakers.

The Issue 2/2019 of the European Journal of Law Reform deals with the topic of post-legislative scrutiny.

Ex-ante impact assessment and ex-post evaluation are regulatory policy tools that help inform the policy-making process with evidence-based analysis. Both tools are geared towards raising the quality of policies and legislation. While Better Regulation is widely deemed a prerogative of the executive branch, increasingly, parliaments are also emerging as actors. This study sheds light on the parliamentary dimension of Better Regulation. Based on a survey, it maps the capacities and experiences of the national parliaments of all 27 European Union (EU) Member States and of 11 further Council of Europe countries in the field of ex-ante impact assessment and ex-post evaluation. The study reveals that roughly half of the surveyed parliaments engage in regulatory policy beyond classical parliamentary scrutiny mechanisms. Overall, these parliaments show a very diverse pattern in terms of drivers, types and depth of engagement. There is no 'one size fits all' approach.

The European Commission has repeatedly emphasized that the results of ex post legislative (EPL) evaluations should be used to improve the quality of its legislative proposals. This article aims to explain the variation in such instrumental use of EPL evaluations by the Commission. Three high-quality EPL evaluations with varying levels of use were studied in-depth to assess the influence of political factors on evaluation use. The results show that, contrary to expectations, EPL evaluations may be used instrumentally even if their recommendations are opposed by important political actors in the legislative process. This article also shows that a lack of salience of the policy field to which an EPL evaluation belongs in the eyes of the Commission could, in combination with the institution's ambition to reduce its legislative output, be a sufficient condition for the non-use of that evaluation.

Our aim is to provide an overview of the debate on the Better Regulation (BR) Agenda presentedin 2015 by the European Commission. In addition to academic literature, we also consider studiesand reports from Think Tanks, international organizations, and EU internal scrutinizing bodies.After presenting the main aspects of the debate on some overarching elements of the BR Agenda,we focus in particular on two highlights: evidence-based policymaking and the integrated policycycle. We structure the discussion around main achievements, remaining critical aspects and sug-gestions about what could be further improved. Findings show that although the Commission re-mains a front-runner when it comes to Better Regulation, more efforts are needed to go the lastmile when it comes to evidence-based policymaking and closing the policy cycle. We find thatthe great majority of arrticles welcome the ambition of th e BR Agenda reform. At the same time,they also make clear that to effectively improve regulation, further methodological guidance andconcrete efforts in implementation are needed. Another interesting finding is that the debate onthe BR Agenda is extremely varied, covering normative as well as very technical aspects. It ap-pears, though, to be confined within certain academic fields (namely political science, public ad-ministration, and law), while other fields that can be, in practice, also deeply linked to BRrelated activities are less represented

This article performs an ‘impact assessment’ of the EU Better Regulation Agenda. It considers whether there is a clear definition of the problems that the EU Better Regulation seeks to address, the evidence base, whether Better Regulation more effectively responds to those problems than alternative options, and what the costs, benefits and broader impacts of the the Agenda may be. The analysis suggests that while the Better Regulation Agenda generally promotes an open yet rational decision‐making process based on sound problem definitions and aiming at targeted solutions calibrated for optimum efficiency and effectiveness, some of its own problem assumptions remain unproven, it possesses contradictory traits and risks being counter productive. Furthermore, while EU Better Regulation may have benefits, it also entails significant costs that should not be overlooked. This assessment reveals the complex and multifaceted nature of EU Better Regulation, and the need to hold it to its own standards.