Regulatory Capture Revisited – Lessons from New Institutional Approaches to Corruption

Regulation is widely considered as the key issue in reforms of public service sectors. But it has been pointed early to the problem that regulatory capture could undermine the stated aims of the reforms. This paper reviews the concept and the literature of regulatory capture under the special focus of public service sectors. Although mentioning corruption as an important mean way of capture, these theories fall short in analysing corruption in detail. The paper thus widens the concept of regulatory capture by introducing recent insights from the economics of corruption. Above all, the black box of corrupt transactions is opened, enabling thereby to understand the channels through which capture occurs. Also, the analysis is extended to different types of corrupt relationships between the actors involved in regulatory processes. By doing so, the paper detects the weak points of regulation and presents some avenues for anti-capture policy measures. JEL: K42, L97, B52, D73