Functional definitions

  • Susy Frankel and John Yeabsley “Introduction” in Susy Frankel Learning from the Past, Adapting for the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand (LexisNexis 2011). Regulation takes many forms. Regulation includes legislation, legal rules, codes of practice (both formal and informal), and a combination of these. As such, it includes government regulation, regional and local government regulation and self-regulation. Any regulation must comply with domestic laws and international treaty commitments. Those commitments include multilateral agreements and free trade agreements. Regulation is an all pervasive part of any modern society. Its design and operation, therefore, is influential in the kind of lives citizens live, and their rights and reasonable expectations as consumers, including their safety. Regulation is also a key element in shaping the framework within which commercial activity takes place. The regulatory structure, therefore, is a vital factor in the well-being of all New Zealanders and consequently should be logical and effective.

  • Ryan Malone and Tim Miller Regulations Review Committee Digest (3rd ed, New Zealand Centre for Public Law, Wellington, 2009) at 64. This Digest contains two definitions, the definition of regulations and the definition of deemed regulations. It should be noted that the definition of regulations in the Regulations (Disallowance) Act above includes deemed regulations. - Regulations are: “drafted by the PCO. Approved by Cabinet. Made by the Governor-General in Executive Council. Notified in the Gazette. Published in the Statutory Regulations (SR) series.” - By contrast, deemed regulations are: “not drafted by the PCO but are instead the responsibility of the organisation making them. Generally made by a single authority such as a Minister or other official. Not usually subject to Cabinet approval or submitted to the Governor-General in Executive Council. Infrequently published in the Statutory Regulations series.”

  • Ministry of Economic Development “NZ Regulatory System Overview” (2010) . The Ministry website says: “[r]egulation for products and services are structured to meet performance requirements and around the risk they pose to human health and safety or environmental impacts. Regulations are typically performance based as opposed to being prescriptive and tend to specify the expectation of how a product should perform”. Under the “Definitions” page on the website the Ministry further states that: “Regulations are laws made by the Governor-General, Ministers of the Crown, and certain other bodies under powers conferred by an Act of Parliament. Regulations generally deal with matters of detail or administration, or matters that are subject to frequent change. Regulations may also be known as Orders in Council, rules, notices, determinations, proclamations, or warrants.”

  • David L Weimer and Aidan R Vining Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice (3rd ed, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River (New Jersey), 1999) at 225-236: specific regulation can include: “Price regulations through rate of return regulation, price caps or price controls; direct regulation of quantity and quality through performance-based (such as the current New Zealand Building Code) or technology-specific standards (such as the prescriptive building code replaced in 1992); direct information provision such as labelling requirements, disclosure and standards, such as energy efficiency labelling requirements; and indirect information provision through the licensing and certification of professions.” “Guide to Regulation in New Zealand”, the Regulations Review Committee adopts the definition of regulations from the Regulations (Disallowance) Act 1989, s 2. This definition means: “(a) regulations, rules or bylaws made under an Act by the Governor-General in Council or by a Minister of the Crown: (b) an Order in Council, Proclamation, notice, Warrant, or instrument made under an enactment that varies or extends the scope or provisions of an enactment: (c) an Order in Council that brings into force, repeals, or suspends an enactment: (d) regulations, rules, or an instrument made under an Imperial Act or the Royal prerogative and having the force of law in New Zealand: (e) an instrument that is a regulation or that is required to be treated as a regulation for the purposes of the Regulations Act 1936 or Acts and Regulations Publication Act 1989 or this Act: (f) an instrument that revokes regulations, rules, bylaws, an Order in Council, a Proclamation, a notice, a Warrant, or an instrument, referred to in paragraphs (a) to (e).”

  • Australian National Audit Office “Administering Regulation: Better Practice Guide” (Canberra, Australian National Audit Office, March 2007). “What is regulation? Regulation is a term covering a diverse set of instruments used by government to influence or control the way people and businesses behave in order to achieve economic, social or environmental policy objectives. Regulation includes any laws or other rules that govern the conduct of people or businesses. It is not limited to primary or delegated legislation; it also includes quasi-regulation (such as codes of conduct or advisory instruments) where there is a reasonable expectation by government of compliance. Examples of regulatory functions that may be used to achieve policy objectives include: - Allocation and protection of rights - Certification or licensing of a product, service, person or business - Registration of professionals and non-professionals - Setting and/or imposing industry standards - Collection of taxes, fees or other revenue” The above was based on the Office of Best Practice Regulation’s definition of regulation, which was used by the Australian Government Taskforce on Reducing Regulatory Burdens on Business (2006).

  • HM Government Impact Assessment Guidance: When to do an Impact Assessment (Crown Copyright, London, 2011) at 19: regulation is defined as “A rule with which failure to comply would result in coming into conflict with the law or being ineligible for funding and other applied for schemes. This includes: EU Regulations; Acts of Parliament; Statutory Instruments; rules, orders, schemes, regulations etc. made under statutory powers by Ministers or agencies; licences and permits under Government authority; codes of practice with statutory force; guidance with statutory force; codes of practice, guidance, self-regulation, partnership agreements with Government backing; approved codes of practice; by-laws made by Government.”

  • Petra Butler “Rights and Regulations” in Susy Frankel Learning from the Past, Adapting for the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand (LexisNexis2011). “Regulation” for the purposes of this chapter is understood as primary and secondary legislation[2] and the lack thereof.[3] Derek Gill in his chapter “Regulatory Management in New Zealand: What, Why and How?” describes the policy objectives of regulatory reform as including:[4] Both “better quality” regulation through more effective alignment of “regulatory means” to achieve policy goals, as well a “regulatory relief” through administrative simplification and deregulation to reduce the perceived burden of regulation.

  • Dean Knight and Rayner Thwaites Review and Appeal of Regulatory Decisions: the tension between Supervision and Performance chapter in Learning from the Past, Adapting for the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand (LexisNexis 2011) We approach the definition of regulatory decision by first defining the field, regulation, and then providing illustrative examples of decisions made in that context. Regulation has both narrow and broad connotations.[9] Regulation has been defined broadly as the “legal rules which seek to steer the behaviour of mainly private citizens and companies”,[10] or the implementation or enforcement of “prescriptive controls over particular kinds of social and economic activities, if necessary through the application of sanctions”.[11] We have adopted a similarly broad conception of regulation,[12] rather than focusing solely on rule-making or application in a particular regulatory sphere, such as economic or commercial regulation.[13] Similarly, our focus is not confined to the application of rules by regulators, but also includes rule-making where the regulator has been delegated or has assumed that function. The performance-supervision dynamic is also engaged in the promulgation of regimes of rules by regulators, albeit that it may operate slightly differently in relation to the review of a law-making function. This wide brief means the examination of the performance-supervision relationship needs to recognise the broad range of decisions being made and reviewed. This may include the promulgation by a regulator of specific rules or codes which regulate social or economic activity, or specific decisions made by a regulator approving or declining such activities. Some illustrative examples include decisions such as: • authorisation of restrictive trade practices or clearance of mergers;[14] • promulgation of price controls; • approval of the use or release of genetically-modified organisms; • development of plans regulating land-use and other activities; • consenting of developments, including assessment against established codes; • promulgation of bylaws regulating land-use and other activities; • development and application of rules restricting land-ownership or overseas investment;[15] • development of broadcasting standards and application of those standards to complaints; • licensing of primary industries and any associated domestic quota allocation;[16] • development, and application, of immigration entry criteria; • licensing of insalubrious trades, such as the sale of liquor and gambling; • promulgation of entry requirements and standards for certain professions and subsequent enforcement of requirements through disciplinary proceedings. The list makes evident the diverse nature of regulatory decisions.

  • Derek Gill “Regulatory Management in New Zealand : What, How and Why?” in Susy Frankel Learning from the Past, Adapting for the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand (LexisNexis2011). Regulation in this context includes: • primary legislation through statutes;and • secondary legislation through statutory regulations by Ministers or public agencies under the authority of statute or by Orders in Council;and • tertiary regulations, which include a wide range of standards and guidelines issued by public agencies or self-regulatory bodies.

  • Derek Gill “Regulatory Management in New Zealand : What, How and Why?” in Susy Frankel Learning from the Past, Adapting for the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand (LexisNexis2011). Regulatory management: …[c]ould be described as a set of rules and constraints (formal and informal) that structure the processes of proposing, developing, implementing, administering, enforcing and evaluating the performance of legislation (primary, secondary and tertiary). That “structuring”will include the allocation of powers, functions and duties of the different participants. It will include both centrally determined and generic rules and processes, and decentralised and tailored rules and processes.

  • Derek Gill “Regulatory Management in New Zealand : What, How and Why?” in Susy Frankel Learning from the Past, Adapting for the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand (LexisNexis2011). The vast bulk of regulation takes the form of specific prohibitions and privileges. Specific regulation according to Weiner and Vining can include:[15] •price regulations through rate of return regulation, price caps or price controls; •direct regulation of quantity and quality through performance-based (such as the current New Zealand building code) or technology-specific standards (such as the prescriptive building code replaced in 1992); •direct information provision such as labelling requirements, disclosure and standards, such as energy efficiency labelling requirements;and ·indirect information provision through the licensing and certification of professions. An important difference between specific regulations and fiscal interventions such as grants, subsidies and specific taxes is how they might change behaviour. Whereas other interventions, such as transfers, involve the state in an enabling role, regulation involves the coercive power of the state in reducing choices by citizens and businesses. The importance of this will become apparent in the discussion of the special characteristics of regulation at [7.7] on the public policy rationale for regulatory management.

  • James Zuccollo, Mike Hensen and John Yeabsley “Weathertight Buildings and Performance-based Regulation: What Lessons can be Drawn from a Complicated and Evolving Situation?” in Susy Frankel and Deborah Ryder (eds) Recalibrating Behaviour: Smarter Regulation in a Global World (LexisNexis 2013). Regulations define processes and standards, or roles and responsibilities, in the exchange of goods and services. They narrow the range of possibilities of what can be exchanged, how it can be exchanged and what buyers, sellers and potentially other stakeholders can expect from that exchange.[43]

  • Dean Knight and Rayner Thwaites Administrative Law through a Regulatory Lens: situating judicial adjudication within a wider accountability framework chapter in Recalibrating Behaviour: Smarter Regulation in a Global World” in Recalibrating Behaviour: Smarter Regulation in a Global World (Lexis Nexis 2013). Regulation is first and foremost about the achievement of social goals; for example, the efficient and affordable provision of electricity or of telecommunications,[4] the optimum level and type of foreign direct investment,[5] or a fit-for-purpose consumer credit regime.[6]

  • Derek Gill “Applying the Logic of Regulatory Management to Regulatory Management in New Zealand” in Susy Frankel and Deborah Ryder (eds) Recalibrating Behaviour: Smarter Regulation in a Global World (LexisNexis 2013). [8] The term "regulation" will be used in this chapter in the economists' sense of an economic instrument using primary, secondary and tertiary rule-making. This is consistent with the instrumental definition used by the Treasury: Regulatory Impact Analysis Handbook (The Treasury, 2009), available at <www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/guidance/regulatory/impactanalysis/ria-handbk-nov09.pdf>. For a discussion of alternative definitions of regulation see David Levi-Faur "Jerusalem Papers on Regulation & Governance" (JPRG, Working Paper No 1, Februrary 2010) at 4–9, available at <www.regulation.huji.ac.il/dp.php>.

  • Alec Mladenovic “Networked Industries: Electricity and Telecommunications” in Susy Frankel (ed) Learning from the Past Adapting to the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand (LexisNexis, 2011). [1] More specifically, the chapter mainly considers regulation that is purported as being primarily concerned with promoting economic efficiency and that typically falls within the ambit of competition policy, law and regulation (thus, regulations dealing with, for instance, safety, measurement, and work standards are not covered in this paper). That being said, it is recognised that economic regulation may have other objectives unrelated to efficiency, such as addressing equity concerns by reallocating wealth distributions.

Thematic definitions

  • Susy Frankel and John Yeabsley “Introduction” in Susy Frankel Learning from the Past, Adapting for the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand (LexisNexis 2011). [Regulation is] the sustained and focused attempt to alter the behaviour of others according to defined standards or purposes with the intention of producing a broadly identified outcome or outcomes. Julia Black “Critical Reflections on Regulation”[1]

  • Mark Bennett and Joel Colón-Ríos Public Participation and Regulation chapter in Learning from the Past, Adapting for the Future: Regulatory Reform in New Zealand, (Lexis Nexis 2011) “Regulation” has been defined by Julia Black as “the sustained and focused attempt to alter the behaviour of others according to defined standards or purposes with the intention of producing a broadly identified outcome or outcomes, which may involve mechanisms of standard-setting, information-gathering and behaviour modification”.[4] This is a definition which shifts away from an exclusive focus on “command and control” rule-making and state intervention in industry. In addition, the goals of regulation have expanded from their core of intervention in industry to prevent market failures to embrace other social goals such as the provision of basic social entitlements or the protection of the environment or human health and safety.[5] This means that the kind of regulatory decisions being made will be based on different considerations, depending on whether the goal of regulation is to correct market failure (a primarily “technical economic question”) or basic social provision (a primarily “political question”), and this will probably have implications for the level of public participation that should be involved in these decisions.[6] However, these categories can sometimes become blurred, and it may be that “there is no clear dividing line in regulatory practice between economic decisions which can be resolved through expertise and social decisions based on value judgments”.[7]

  • Commerce Commission “Regulation” (2011) . The Commerce Commission states that “[r]egulation is designed to ensure that suppliers of regulated goods and services have similar incentives and pressures to suppliers operating in competitive markets. Suppliers of regulated goods and services should not be able to earn excessive products”.

  • Bettina Lange “Regulation” in Peter Cane and Joanne Conaghan (eds) The New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008) at 996. Lange defines regulation broadly as the “legal rules which seek to steer the behaviour of mainly private citizens and companies but also of central and local government as well as public agencies… Classic definitions of regulation focus on state regulation of private activity. Recent scholarship also includes regulation between private actors, self-regulation, and the regulation of public powers by the state itself or private actors. Recent scholarship also includes regulation between private actors, self-regulation, and the regulation of public powers by the state itself or private actors.”

  • Karen Yeung “Regulatory Agencies” in Peter Cane and Joanne Conaghan (eds) The New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008) at 998. Regulation can be defined as the implementation or enforcement of “prescriptive controls over particular kinds of social and enforcement activities, if necessary through the application of sanctions”.

  • House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution The Regulatory State: Ensuring its Accountability (The Stationery Office Limited, London, 2004). Also available at www.publications.parliament.uk. Regulation is “a means to an end, not an end in itself” (at para 4). The report divides regulation into “three broad categories – economic regulation aimed at controlling the abuse of monopoly power; regulation of public goods and external effects, such as environmental pollution; and social regulation.” It then goes on to say that “[r]egulation is achieved by decisions intended to control or influence specific elements of the regulate activity. They are implemented by the setting, monitoring and enforcement of standards designed to achieve chosen objectives.” It adopts the definition utilised by the Better Regulation Task Force (at para 24):

  • United Kingdom Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Occasional Paper No 3: Impact of regulation on productivity (Crown Copyright, London, 2008) at 2: Regulation is defined as “Rules imposed which govern aspects of the activities of organisations and individuals”.

  • Robert Baldwin, Colin Scott and Christopher Hood “Introduction” in Robert Baldwin, Colin Scott and Christopher Hood (eds) A Reader on Regulation (Oxford University Press, New York, 1998) 1 at 2-3: “There is no single agreed meaning of the term, but rather a variety of definitions in usage which are not reducible to some platonic essence or single concept… At its simplest, regulation refers to the promulgation of an authoritative set of rules, accompanied by some mechanism, typically a public agency, for monitoring and promoting compliance with these rules. Rule-making and monitoring / enforcement mechanisms need not be located in a single institution… A second, broader, conception of regulation, commonly found in the political economy literature, takes in all the efforts of state agencies to steer the economy. Thus, while rule-making and application through enforcement systems would come within such a definition, a wide range of other government instruments based on government authority such as taxation and disclosure requirements might also be included… A third definition, broader still, considers all mechanisms of social control – including unintentional and non-state processes – to be forms of regulation… Thus a notion of intentionality about the development of norms is dropped, and anything producing effects on behaviour is capable of being considered as regulatory.”

  • Bronwen Morgan and Karen Yeung An Introduction to Law and Regulation: Text and Materials (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007) at 3-4 [commenting on the Hood definition below]: “a functional approach to regulation, often referred to as a cybernetics perspective, is widely used and accepted… By focusing on a tripartite division between regulation’s core functions, definitional contestation over the appropriate scope of the regulatory field is avoided. In contrast, attempts to define the proper scope of the regulation provoke a much greater level of disagreement, often because of the political and ideological battles referred to above. At their narrowest, definitions of regulation tend to centre on deliberate attempts by the state to influence socially valuable behaviour which may have adverse side-effects by establishing, monitoring and enforcing legal rules. At its broadest, regulation is seen as encompassing all forms of social control, whether intentional or not, and whether imposed by the state or other social institutions. Lawyers have tended to focus on the narrower definition largely because of the state’s monopoly over the coercive power of the law. From a traditional legal perspective, one might think of a statute promulgated by a sovereign legislature as the paradigmatic form of regulation.”

  • C Hood, H Rothstein and R Baldwin The Government of Risk (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001) at 23: adopts a functional definition of regulation as “any control system in art or nature must be definition contain a minimum of the three components… There must be some capacity for standard-setting, to allow a distinction to be made between more or less preferred states of the system. There must also be some capacity for information-gathering or monitoring to produce knowledge about current or changing states of the system. On top of that must be some capacity for behaviour-modification to change the state of the system.”

  • Anthony I Ogus Regulation: Legal Form and Economic Theory (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2004) at 1: The expression ‘regulation’ is frequently found in both legal and non-legal contexts. It is not a term of art, and unfortunately it has acquired a bewildering variety of meanings. Sometimes it is used to indicate any form of behavioural control, whatever the origin. But when, in the rhetoric of the day, politicians and others refer to the stifling effect on industry of ‘regulation’ and the need to ‘deregulate’, they clearly do not have such a broad concept in mind. They may be assumed instead to be referring to what one American social scientist has described as the ‘central meaning’ of regulation: a ‘sustained and focused control exercised by a public agency over activities that are valued by a community’. The emphasis on ‘valued activities’ serves to exclude from the concept of regulation the traditional areas of criminal law and the concerns of the criminal justice system. But, for the purposes of describing the subject matter of this book, the concept must be narrowed still further. We need to recognize that ‘regulation’ is fundamentally a politico-economic concept and, as such, can best be understood by reference to different systems of economic organization and the legal forms which maintain them.”

  • Tony Prosser Law and the Regulators (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997) at 4: “Definitions include, at the most general level, the act of controlling, directing, or governing according to a rule, principle, or system. This includes any conscious ordering of activity… At the most specific extreme, regulation refers to the legal rules and other measures which express such command and control arrangements, contrasted with other forms of law such as criminal and contract law…”

  • CD Foster (cited in Prosser above) Privatization, Public Ownership and the Regulation of Natural Monopoly (Blackwell, Oxford, 1992) at 186: “In its widest conception [regulation] is state intervention in the economic decisions of companies.”

  • Tony Prosser The Regulatory Enterprise: Government, Regulation and Legitimacy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) at 1-2: [w]hilst regulation may be needed, it is portrayed as a second-best choice for social organisation; in principle free markets giving us economic freedom and consumer choice should be preferred wherever possible. Regulation is thus an always regrettable means of correcting market failures. This concept of regulation is, by implication, a narrow one; regulation is part of economic management… [A]cademic writing has developed a concept of regulation which has become ever wider. This is evident in the range of institutions which are counted as engaged in regulation; it has expanded from government departments to independent agencies, to ‘self-regulation’ and ‘co-regulation’, and finally to regulation by private organizations.

  • David Goddard QC “Public Law and Regulation” in Karen Clark QC (Chair) Administrative Law – the public law scene in 2011 (New Zealand Law Society Intensive, Wellington, 2011) 112 at 112: “Regulation is not a term of art. It is sometimes used to refer to all forms of government intervention in the affairs of individuals and firms: but that is not the sense in which I use the term in this paper. Rather, I adopt the common definition of ‘sustained and focused control exercised by a public agency over activities that are valued by a community’. So for example I do not include taxation or general criminal law as a form of regulation. Nor are default terms for private relationships, such as those found in the contract statutes and the Sale of Goods Act 1908, regulation in this sense. But the term is still a very broad one that embraces everything from the Food Act 1981 and the Building Act 2004 to the Telecommunications Act 2001, Part 4 of the Commerce Act 1986 and the Securities Act 1978.”

  • Philip Selznick “Focusing Organizational Research on Regulatoin” in R Noll (ed) Regulatory Policy and the Social Sciences (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985) 363 at 363: regulation is a “sustained and focused control exercised by a public agency over activities that are valued by a community”.

  • Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave and Martin Lodge “Introduction: Regulation – The Field and the Developing Agenda” in Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave and Martin Lodge (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Regulation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010) 3 at 11-12: Varying definitions of regulation range from references to: a specific set of commands; to deliberate state influence; to all forms of social control… all of these definitions suffer from under- and over-inclusiveness. It is nevertheless fair to suggest that regulation, at its broadest level, has allowed scholarship to return to issues of control (whether studied through principal-agent, cybernetic, cultural, or institutionalist lenses)… Philip Selznick’s seminal definition… can now be seen as highly problematic… Therefore, we follow Julia Black’s more wide-ranging definition.”

  • Cento Veljanovski “Economic Approaches to Regulation” in Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave and Martin Lodge (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Regulation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010) 17 at 19: “…it is important to make a distinction between normative and positive theories. Normative theories seek to establish ideal regulation from an economic perspective, and are prescriptive. They are usually based on the concepts of economic efficiency and ‘market failure’, and provide an economic version of a ‘public interest theory’ of regulation. Positive economics is the explanatory and empirical limb of the economics of regulation. It seeks to explain the nature and development of regulation and its impact through statistical analysis, and sometimes cost-benefit assessments.”

  • Cento Veljanovski “Strategic Use of Regulation” in Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave and Martin Lodge (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Regulation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010) 87 at 87: “Regulation exists to get industry, organisations, and individuals to modify their behaviour to gain compliance with the law, and ultimately to achieve desired outcomes. Yet it operates in a world where the law is imperfect, enforcement and compliance costly, resources limited, and the regulator has discretion. Regulation has two other features – it generates winners and losers; and its creation and enforcement are the outcome of political and legal processes. This is simply to say that the ‘stakes’ surrounding regulatory change can be high and the stakeholders can often influence the outcome.” At 89: “The dominant view in politics and among the public is that regulation remedies market failure and redistributes wealth, and that it effectively achieves these two objectives on average”.

  • Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite Responsive Regulation: Transcending the Regulation Debate (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992): defines regulation in terms of dialogic regulatory culture in which the regulators signal to industry their commitment to escalate their enforcement response whenever lower levels of intervention fail.

  • Cary Coglianese and Evan Mendelson “Meta-Regulation and Self-Regulation” in Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave and Martin Lodge (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Regulation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010) 146 at 146: “The conventional view of regulation emphasises two opposing conditions: freedom and control. Government can either leave businesses with complete discretion to act according to their own interests, or it can impose regulations taking that discretion away by threatening sanctions aimed at bringing firms’ interests into alignment with those of society, as a whole. This latter approach is often characterised, pejoratively, as ‘command-and-control’ regulation”.

  • Niamh Moloney “Financial Services and Markets” in Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave and Martin Lodge (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Regulation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010) 437 at 437: “The traditional rationale for financial services and markets regulation is the correction of market failures related to asymmetric information and to externalities, notably systemic risks, in order to support market efficiency and efficient resource allocation.”

  • Jürgen Feick and Raymund Werle “Regulation of Cyberspace” in Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave and Martin Lodge (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Regulation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010) 523 at 525: “[R]egulationrefers to ‘different forms of deliberative collective action in matters of public interest (Mayntz, 2009: 121, 122). According to this definition, the concept of regulation goes beyond command and control concepts of the regulatory policy type… and focuses in a wider perspective on the development and application of public or private rules directed at specific population targets.” [emphasis in original; R Mayntz “The Changing Governance of Large Technical Infrastructure Systems” in R Mayntz (ed) über Governance: Institutionen und Prozesse politischer Regelung (Campus Verlag, Frankfurt, 2009)]

  • Martin Lodge and Christopher Hood “Regulation Inside Government: Retro-Theory Vindicated or Outdate?” in Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave and Martin Lodge (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Regulation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010) 590 at 591: “Given that the R-word can distort our perceptions, particularly when comparing methods of control and oversight of government across different state and linguistic traditions, it is perhaps best regarded as a loose umbrella term that has come to be used to denote three kinds of oversight activity that have traditionally been analysed separately and which go under different titles in different state tradition (Hood et al. (1999) termed them ‘waste-watching’, ‘quality policing’, and ‘sleaze-busting’).” [C Hood, C Scott, O James, G Jones and T Travers Regulation Inside Government: Waste Watchers, Quality Police and Sleaze Busters (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999)