The Evaluation of Regulatory Agencies

This paper presents a survey and overview of the evaluation of infrastructure regulation and regulatory agencies. It covers the development of ex ante and ex post evaluation based on costbenefit analysis and the application of these methods to regulation in the UK, the European Union and the USA. Much of the work in this area has been on infrastructure regulation in developing countries. The paper discusses the evaluation issues involved and covers the use of case studies, econometric techniques and, briefly, randomised experiments. The paper discusses the origin, contents and lessons from the 2006 World Bank Handbook on evaluating infrastructure regulatory frameworks. The paper concludes with some general comments on the role of evaluation both for establishing the accountability of regulatory arrangements as well as for providing a process by which they and others can systematically learn from experience.