Regulatory assessment toolkit

Regulatory Assessment Toolkit: A Practical Methodology for Assessing Regulation on Services Trade and Investment provides guidance on how to assess and reform the regulatory policies of service trade industries. The toolkit can help government officials evaluate whether their regulatory framework addresses market failures, achieves public interest goals in an efficient manner, and promotes the development of an efficient domestic services market. Depending on the circumstances and the needs of the authorities, the toolkit can serve different purposes, including supporting regulatory reform, improving regulatory governance, negotiating and implementing trade agreements, and streamlining regulations to attract foreign investment. The Regulatory Assessment Toolkit will be of particular interest to policy makers and government officials from regulatory bodies, experts at development banks and donor agencies, and academics and researchers in the field of economic regulation. Services are famously (and indeed on occasions literally) where the rubber of trade meets the road of a country's domestic economic conditions. Domestic regulation of services has a significant impact on the vibrancy of trade in services and simultaneously in trade in goods, since services such as telecommunications, transport, financial, and energy are inputs to the manufacturing process. Not surprisingly, domestic regulation of services faces steep technical, institutional, and political challenges, which are frequently not obvious either to the casual observer looking in from the outside or to the sectoral specialist steeped in the nitty gritty. That is why the Regulatory Assessment Toolkit is such a useful resource: It offers a sturdy framework for structured, unbiased, and exhaustive analysis of specific regulatory setups that will surely help put the diagnosis of regulatory challenges and the discussion of reform measures to improve efficiency on a sound basis. Efficiency of services, both domestic and imported, is key to an economy's overall competitiveness and to consumer welfare, both in developed and developing countries. The Regulatory Assessment Toolkit, together with similar initiatives, is a great tool to help direct and push much-needed reform in these sectors.