A Regulatory Analysis of Australia's Anti-dumping Law and Policy: Statutory Failure or Regulatory Capture?

Anti-dumping and countervailing (AD/CVD) law and policy permits nations to impose corrective duties against unfairly traded imports found to have injured domestic industries. However, administrators of AD/CVD policy around the world are criticised for misusing the remedy as an elaborate and complex protectionist mechanism.
A problem with many critical reviews is that explanations as to how misuse occurs, or at what point in the administrative process regulatory authorities are able to exercise bias, are rarely provided. In the Australian context, the task of identifying a source and opportunity for misuse is made complicated by three major forces affecting the decision-making processes of the Australian regulatory authorities, the Australian Customs Service and Australian Anti-Dumping Authority (ACS and ADA). This article examines the influence which Australia's international obligations, government and public policy processes and the Federal Court have upon the administration of AD/CVD law and policy in order to determine the degree of autonomy afforded to the ACS and ADA.     

Political Capture

National Commission of Audit, Report to the Commonwealth Government , Canberra: AGPS, June 1996. ISBN 0 644 36116 6. xxviii + 409 pp. 24.95     

Controlling Regulatory Agencies

This article describes the regulatory agencies in Norway as part of the population of state agencies by focusing on who controls and what is controlled and how. The authors analyze whether regulatory agencies are regulated and controlled to different degrees, by different external actors, and in different ways than other agencies, and on whether this control focuses on different aspects. They also examine whether the variation in regulation and control according to type of agency task is sustained if one controls for structural and cultural features. The empirical basis is a broad survey of Norwegian state agencies carried out in 2004, and the theoretical approaches embrace a task-specific, a structural-instrumental and a cultural-institutional perspective. The authors find that regulatory tasks represent a major activity for state agencies in Norway and that external control by both the executive and the legislative bodies of agencies is rather significant. Moreover, in contrast to what one would expect, given current regulatory orthodoxy, regulatory agencies are controlled to a larger extent than other agencies.     

Toward a Regulatory Budget

A regulatory budget would require the federal government to treat compliance costs incurred by the private sector as if they were incurred by the government, without requiring the government to actually assume those costs. For example, EPA could be given a regulatory compliance budget of say $80 billion in FY98. A regulatory budget would provoke an annual debate in Congress on the size of EPA's or OSHA's budget. Such a debate would force the proponents to weigh the benefits and costs of various regulatory programs, something now lacking in the political process.
Interest in a regulatory budget reflects the slight gains in the quality of regulatory decision making resulting from mandatory regulatory review. It is now apparent that better information about the costs, benefits, and distributional consequences of regulation will not automatically improve regulatory decision making-although it would not hurt.     

Regulatory regimes and accountability

This research considers accountability issues for new forms of regulation that shift the emphasis from prescribing actions to regulating systems or regulating for results. Shortfalls at various levels of accountability are identified from experiences with these regimes in the regulation of building and fire safety, food safety and nuclear power plant safety. These experiences illustrate how accountability shortfalls can undermine regulatory performance and introduce a potential for subtle forms of regulatory capture. These concerns underscore the importance of finding the right fit between regulatory circumstances and the design of regulatory regimes.     

Business–Regulatory Relations: Learning to Play Regulatory Games in European Utility Markets

Although regulation is on the rise in the European Union, the liberalization of the telecommunication and energy markets has not created a uniform European Regulatory model. The principle focus of this article is to examine the interaction and regulatory learning between national regulatory authorities and business in the U.K. and German utility markets to assess the degree of convergence and demonstrate how the regulatory relationship has evolved beyond that envisaged in the initial delegation of powers to the regulator. The article shows that independent regulatory authorities have moved from distant and often confrontational relationships with business to strategic working relationships driven by exchanges of information and reputation building and that regulatory learning and trust have evolved at distinct speeds in sectors and countries depending on the number of regulatory authorities in a market place, the degree to which there are concurrent powers between authorities, their discretion in the consultation process, and the length of time that regulatory authorities had existed. Consequently, significant variance is continuously seen in the business—regulator relationships in comparing the young legalist German regulatory authorities with the established independent and discretion-based regulators in the U.K.     

Regulatory Errors with Endogenous Agendas

How do a regulator's decisions depend on the characteristics and strategies of its external clients? We develop a theory of approval regulation in which an uninformed regulator may veto the submission of a better‐informed firm. The firm can perform publicly observable experiments to generate product information prior to submission. We find that when experimentation is short, Type I errors (approving bad products) are more likely for products submitted by firms with lower experimentation costs (larger firms), while Type II errors (rejecting good products) should be concentrated among smaller firms. These comparative statics are reversed when experimentation is long. We perform a statistical analysis on FDA approvals of new pharmaceutical products using two different measures of Type I error. We find consistent support for the counterintuitive hypothesis that, under particular conditions, errors are decreasing in the size of the firm submitting the product.     

Public Health and the Regulatory State

Public health has moved from the public good component of health to everything related to health and, then, to everything related to society. If we take public health in its wide, total, social sense, it presumably explains or justifies much of the regulatory state. Virtually all state activities contribute directly or indirectly to some citizens’ “physical, mental and social well-being” (as the World Health Organization’s definition says). Public health requires social engineering, which cannot be achieved without controlling the lifestyles that the Philosopher King doesn’t like. Controlling lifestyles cannot be done without regulating the businesses that would allow people to satisfy their sinful preferences, and without preventing these people from circumventing the controls through black markets or other violations of government regulation.     

Bureaucratic Inefficiency: Failure to Capture the Efficiencies of Outsourcing

This paper analyzes the political economy ofoutsourcing by 16 federal bureaus during 1981-96. Inan era of restricted budgets and budget balancing, thepaper questions why federal bureaus did not exploitfully the efficiencies of outsourcing. It proves thatfederal bureaus can achieve technical and costefficiency through outsourcing when contracts can benearly fully specified. Federal bureaus outsource byobtaining inputs to their production processes throughcontracts with competitive market producing units. Econometric results substantiate the hypothesis that``institutions matter,'' and reveal that bureausachieve varying levels of technical efficiency throughdifferent levels of outsourcing.     

Corporate Environmentalism, Regulatory Reform, and Industry Self-Regulation: Toward Genuine Regulatory Reinvention in the United States

Increasingly, corporations are proactively managing environmental impacts in response to pressures from the consumer, business-to-business, financial, and government procurement markets. In many cases, these efforts have produced results well beyond what could be required under public regulations. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began a process of regulatory reinvention in the 1990s as a means of promoting such innovations, the results have been somewhat disappointing. This article examines the recent trends in corporate environmental management and regulatory reform. It concludes with a discussion of changes in regulatory design that could promote ongoing gains in corporate environmental performance through the creation of a hybrid system combining elements of public regulation, government-supervised corporate self-regulation, mandatory information disclosure, and green procurement.     

Using Non-Governmental Resources to Foster Regulatory Compliance

This article explores means by which non-governmental institutions and resources, both commercial and voluntay, may be enlisted in the interest of regulatory compliance. Following a discussion of non-governmental social control, it reviews the basic institutional forms of indirect governance through which third-party “co-production” of compliance might occur. It then discusses the basic issues which arise when certain public functions are delegated to or devolve upon private interests, and suggests safeguards which might be put in place to enhance the advantages and to minimize the adverse consequences of such devolution. The conclusion seeks to articulate basic principles for the mobilization of third parties in furtherance of compliance, and to encourage the idea of a more participative regulatoy process.     

Regulatory policy toward domestic crude oil production

Government policy toward domestic crude oil production has been justified in the past in reference to economic theory of regulation. Regulatory approaches have depended upon prevailing attitudes toward the price of crude oil. Imposition of price controls in 1971 represented a watershed in this area, although the future course of regulation remains uncertain.Mark W. Anderson, formerly a Research Associate with The Futures Group, is now studying the dynamics of land use regulation at the University of Maine. Special thanks are due to Dr. Stephen D. Reiling, Assistant Professor of Resource Economics, The University of Maine at Orono, for his insights into this topic and to two referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.