1887

OECD Environment Working Papers

Cette série d’études porte sur des questions relatives à l’environnement . Elle est destinée à un large public. Il s’agit généralement d’un travail collectif, mais les noms des principaux auteurs sont cités. Ces documents existent uniquement en version originale – anglais ou français – et sont assortis d’un résumé dans l’autre langue.

Anglais

Retrospective evaluation of chemical regulations

OECD countries rely on regulatory tools to manage potential risks from exposure to targeted chemicals. Ex-ante regulatory impact assessment has a long tradition in many OECD countries, with established analytical steps and oversight as well as opportunities for public engagement to hold governments accountable for conducting analysis before regulations are issued. But ex-ante analyses necessarily depend on unverifiable assumptions and models of how the world would look absent the regulation, and how responses to regulatory requirements will alter those conditions. In essence, ex-ante analyses are hypotheses of the effects of regulatory actions.

Better ex-post regulatory evaluation would allow agencies and others to test those hypotheses against actual outcomes. This would not only inform decisions related to the cost-effectiveness of existing policy, but would provide feedback that would improve future ex-ante analyses and future policies. However, ex-post analysis also poses challenges, especially when it comes to chemical risks. Once a regulation is in place, it is not always obvious what the world would have looked like without it. Measuring opportunity costs is not easy, and measuring regulatory benefits is often harder. Furthermore, once a regulation is in place, neither regulators nor regulatory entities have strong incentives for examining its actual impact.

As a result of these methodological and incentive challenges, while ex-post evaluation has a long tradition in other areas (particularly in programmes financed through the fiscal budget), it has received little attention (and even fewer resources) in the regulatory arena, despite government guidelines requiring it.

This paper attempts to address these challenges to evaluating regulatory outcomes and learning from those evaluations. Drawing on experience in OECD countries, it reviews the practices used to understand the likely impacts of regulations aimed at reducing chemical risks both before and after they are issued. It examines why efforts at retrospective review have lagged behind prospective regulatory analysis, and offers recommendations for addressing methodological and incentive challenges to better evaluation.

Anglais

Mots-clés: benefit-cost analysis, regulatory impact analysis, retrospective review, environmental impact analysis, evaluation, chemical risk, regulations
JEL: Q58: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Environmental Economics: Government Policy; Q5: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics; Q51: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Valuation of Environmental Effects; D81: Microeconomics / Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty / Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty; Q52: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Pollution Control Adoption and Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects; D78: Microeconomics / Analysis of Collective Decision-Making / Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error