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Regulatory Policy and Governance

Regulations are one of the key levers alongside fiscal and monetary interventions, by which governments act to promote economic prosperity, enhance welfare and pursue public interest. Governments must be actively engaged in assuring the quality of regulation, not reactively responding to market failures. This requires an explicit “whole-of-government” commitment toward the pursuit of a higher quality regulatory environment that encourages sustainable growth for all.

What is the Regulatory Policy Committee

The Regulatory Policy Committee (RPC) was created by the OECD Council on 22 October 2009 to assist member and non-member countries in building and strengthening their regulatory policy of reform efforts. The RPC has Bureau members – a number of delegates designated annually to serve as officers who represent the Committee – who provide detailed direction to the OECD Secretariat on issues of management and planning of the work programme.

What does the Regulatory Policy Division do?

The Regulatory Policy Division which is part of the OECD Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate (GOV), serves as the Secretariat of the RPC and carries out its work programme. The Regulatory Policy Division aims at building policy support for the implementation of good regulatory practices.

This includes work such as:

OECD reviews of regulatory policy by country. These cover:

• OECD reviews on regulatory policy;
• OECD reviews of Better Regulation in the EU15;
• Co-operation with non-member countries on specific projects: MENA, APEC, several initiatives with non-member countries (China, Viet Nam, India, Indonesia, Russia)

Helping member countries adapt regulatory policies, tools and institutions and learn from each other’s experience through a set of instruments and practices such as RIA, administrative simplification, risk and regulatory policy, regulatory compliance and enforcement; transparency and communication; and alternatives to regulation.

The Measuring Regulatory Performance programme assists OECD member and non-members to demonstrate how improvements to regulatory governance deliver actual benefits to business and citizens; and how measuring regulatory performance can be used to diagnose success and failures, and improve regulatory policies, programmes and tools, and communicate progress.

Regulatory Policy and Policy Principles (see Principles)

Regulatory policy concerns how governments intervene in the economy through laws and other instruments in pursuit of social, economic and environmental objectives. The emphasis of the Regulatory Policy Division is on ensuring and promoting regulatory quality – combining both good regulation where needed to enhance the functioning of markets or to protect health, safety, or the environment, with reforms when appropriate, to encourage open competition, entrepreneurship and innovation.

The 2012 Recommendation of the Council on Regulatory Policy and Governance now sets the current thinking of how to effectively implement regulatory policy in countries, based on the experiences of the Regulatory Policy Committee (RPC). The 2012 Recommendations are the most detailed set of guidelines or principles that the OECD has developed in the field of regulatory policy.