Publications & Documents

The world is becoming increasingly global. This raises important challenges for regulatory processes which still largely emanate from domestic jurisdictions. In order to eliminate unnecessary regulatory divergences and to address the global challenges pertaining to systemic risks, the environment, and human health and safety, governments increasingly seek to better articulate regulations across borders and to ensure greater enforcement of rules. But, surprisingly, the gains that can be achieved through greater co-ordination of rules and their application across jurisdictions remain largely under-analysed.
 
This volume complements the stocktaking report on International Regulatory Co-operation: Rules for a Global World by providing evidence on regulatory co-operation in four sectors: chemical safety, consumer product safety, model tax convention, and competition law enforcement. The four case studies follow the same outline to allow for comparison. 

During the past decade, the Mexican government has put into place a strong policy framework for the promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurship.   It has created a sequence of policy support running from the development of new entrepreneurs, micro-enterprises, SMEs and gazelles  to the stimulation of linkages between SMEs and so-called 'tractor' firms.  New co-ordination arrangements have also been created across government ministries and among national and state governments to increase the coherence and integration of their  programmes.  This publication takes stock of this progress and assesses the opportunities for further strengthening of the Mexican economy through SMEs and entrepreneurship.  It shows that the framework conditions are generally good in Mexico, and have improved in recent years thanks to reforms such as regulatory simplification, the expansion of the national loan guarantee programme, and the inclusion of the micro-enterprise sector as a target of the public support system.  At the same time, more can be done to shift entrepreneurs into the formal business sector and to develop more medium-sized companies able to innovate and trade internationally. There is also scope to improve the process of delivering the highest quality and most relevant policy support to beneficiary enterprises by simplifying the rules and operations of the SME Fund, developing the professional capacities of the staff and consultants who provide business development services and using available company-level data for the purposes of policy evaluation.

The world is becoming increasingly global. This raises important challenges for regulatory processes which still largely emanate from domestic jurisdictions.   In order to eliminate unnecessary regulatory divergences and to address global challenges pertaining to systemic risks, the environment, and human health and safety, governments increasingly seek to better articulate regulations across borders and to ensure greater enforcement of rules and their application across jurisdictions.

This report gathers in a synthetic manner the knowledge and evidence available to date on the various mechanisms available to governments to promote regulatory co-operation, and their benefits and challenges. The review of evidence confirms the increased internationalisation of regulation, which takes place through a wide variety of mechanisms and multiple actors, and highlights a shift in the nature of IRC from complete 'harmonisation' of regulation to more flexible options - such as mutual recognition agreements. Despite growing regulatory co-operation, however, decision making on IRC is not informed by a clear understanding of benefits costs and success factors of the diverse IRC options.