From: Notice & Comment | A Blog from the Yale Journal on Regulation and the ABA Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice

by Reeve Bull and Jerry Ellig

Part I—The Rise of Regulatory Impact Analysis

The concept of disciplining regulatory choices through the application of benefit-cost analysis to regulatory decisionmaking is largely an American innovation.  As Jim Tozzi has shown, the idea of economic assessment of proposed rules goes back to the Johnson Administration.  Presidents Carter and Reagan issued the executive orders that created the modern system of regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) and executive review within the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which has been reaffirmed by every subsequent administration.

Notwithstanding its first-mover status, the U.S. has recently fallen behind many of its international peers.  A recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations shows that countries such as the UK, Canada, and Australia have built on U.S. innovations to design a more comprehensive, sophisticated system of economic analysis.  And though the economic analysis conducted in the European Union tends to be less rigorous than that performed in the U.S., the EU has an integrated system wherein most major proposed laws (including both what would be termed statutes and regulations in the U.S.) are subject to economic analysis.

Read Complete Article (includes links to Parts 2 and 3).