The work of the Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate (GOV) on regulatory policy is aimed at building policy support and skills for good regulations in member countries. The intent is to establish a longer-term basis for efficient and responsive regulation, based on market, juridical, and public management principles.

Regulation concerns how governments intervene in the economy in pursuit of social, economic and environmental objectives through laws and other instruments. Even as there are efforts to deregulate, new regulations are added in response to technological change and fresh challenges, for example, associated with risk management. GOV's emphasis is on regulatory quality - combining both good regulation where needed to protect health, safety, and the environment, and to enhance the functioning of markets, and deregulation where free markets work better.

Activities focus on administrative simplification, improving regulatory compliance, independent regulators, tools for self-assessment, regulatory impact assessment, and cross-sectoral and multilevel co-ordination. This is a dynamic field in which all OECD countries are undertaking change. The work on regulation is overseen by the Regulatory Management and Reform Working Party of the Public Governance Committee and brings together policy officials responsible for cross-cutting and horizontal regulatory reform policies.

In 1995, the Working Party developed the 1995 OECD Recommendation  which has been used by many countries as the basis for new disciplines on the use of regulation. It has played a central role in steering the multidisciplinary OECD Regulatory Reform Programme of country reviews, and in sharing OECD country experiences with interested countries in the Asia-Pacific Region, the Middle East and North Africa, Russia, South East Europe and Latin America. The Working Party contributed to the 2005 OECD Guiding Principles, and the APEC-OECD Integrated Checklist on Regulatory Reform.

More