Regulatory Reform Competition And Innovation

Regulatory reform can spur innovations in infrastructure services, generating new downstream activities and magnifying the economywide benefits of reform. The national competition agency can help greatly in laying the groundwork for reform by making a compelling case for the reform's expected benefits.

Regulatory reform can spu ...

Canada, one of the OECD’s strongest economies, has a mature, effective and innovative system of regulatory governance closely linked to the government’s public policy goals. Canadians attach growing priority to health, safety and the environment, and seek a balance among economic, competitiveness and social goals. This is a demanding agenda: in international trade – a major driver of the economy – Canada needs to maintain a careful balance between bilateral and multilateral liberalisation efforts. Further work is needed to improve the effectiveness of the single internal market. Competition policy needs to make a much stronger contribution to regulatory reform and market openness. Despite a positive policy shift, some important sectors are protected through import and foreign ownership restrictions. The recently launched government’s Innovation Strategy is expected to make a major contribution to address these challenges. Canada is one of many OECD countries to request a broad review by the OECD of its regulatory practices and reforms. This review presents an overall picture, set within a macro-economic context, of regulatory achievements and challenges including the quality of the public sector, competition policy and market openness. It also assesses progress in the telecommunications sector. The background material used to prepare this report is available at: www.oecd.org/regreform/backgroundreports In the same series: Regulatory Reform in the Czech Republic Regulatory Reform in Denmark Regulatory Reform in Greece Regulatory Reform in Hungary Regulatory Reform in Ireland Regulatory Reform in Italy Regulatory Reform in Japan Regulatory Reform in Korea Regulatory Reform in Mexico Regulatory Reform in the Netherlands Regulatory Reform in Poland Regulatory Reform in Spain Regulatory Reform in Turkey Regulatory Reform in the United Kingdom Regulatory Reform in the United States The policy starting point for these reviews is presented in the OECD Report on Regulatory Reform: Synthesis, and the supporting two-volume OECD Report on Regulatory Reform: Sectoral and Thematic Studies, published in 1997.

The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.

The pace and scope of innovation are challenging the way governments regulate. Existing regulatory frameworks might not be agile enough to accommodate the fast pace of technological development and, as a consequence, rules might become outdated. Beyond this pacing problem, technological innovation also blurs the traditional definition of markets, challenges enforcement and transcends administrative boundaries domestically and internationally. This report, which results from a joint project between the OECD and the Korea Development Institute, presents a set of case studies illustrating the different regulatory challenges raised by emerging technologies and the diversity of regulatory responses used to address them. The case studies cover data-driven business models, digital innovation in finance, smart contracts relying on distributed ledger technologies, digital technologies for smart logistics, and the sharing economy.

In Innovation and the State, Cristie Ford examines the problem of innovation and its relationship to flexible regulation.

This report encourages governments to “think big” about the relevance of regulatory policy and assesses the recent efforts of OECD countries to develop and deepen regulatory policy and governance.