George Mason University’s Mercatus Center is a top public policy think tank based in Virginia near Washington, DC. Some of its 2012 publications might be of interest to readers of Insights:
a 28-page blueprint for regulatory reform in the United States (the blueprint could be easily applied to New Zealand).
a 27-page US policy guide highlighting the scale of the nation’s fiscal problems with the strong message that taxes cannot be increased enough to fund spending.
a 128-page second edition of its primer on regulation. The review of theories about why governments regulate is concise and useful (chapter 2). The primer reported that federal spending on writing, administering and enforcing regulations had risen from $3.4 billion in 1960 to $60 billion in 2013, in constant 2012 dollars!
However, the really new piece of research is this: Until now, the common default option has been to use the growth in the number of pages of regulations as an indicator of the increase in regulatory intrusiveness. This approach has obvious deficiencies, and allows no industry breakdown.
Last month, Mercatus released a new text-count way of measuring by industry the burden of growth in intrusive federal regulation in the United States.
The essence of the methodology is to use computer software to count the number of words of a restrictive or prohibitive nature in each regulation in the Code of Federal Regulations. Currently, the software counts words such as ‘shall’, ‘must’, ‘may not’, ‘prohibited’ and ‘required’. These are words that anyone would associate with the finger-wagging nanny state, albeit not exclusively.
To illustrate the results, in 1997, there were 834,949 instances of these words in the register. By 2010 (the last year for which data is available), the count had risen to 1,001,153 – an increase of 16.6% in 13 years. That is an average increase of 12,808 of these finger-wagging words per year.
A major effort has gone into using word string searches to identify which industries are affected by each regulation in the code. An SSRN working paper explains the methodology.
Mercatus is calling the new database Regdata. The database is interactive and free, with videos explaining how to access and use it.
A similar research project on Kiwi regulation would no doubt be an interesting exercise.