Impact Assessment in the EU: a tool for better regulation, less regulation or less bad regulation?

Impact Assessments (IAs) were introduced at the EU level under the rhetorical facade of ‘better regulation’. The actual aim was to improve not only the quality but also the reputation of EU regulation before stakeholders. However, evidence brought forward by a number of evaluations pointed out that IAs are yet to achieve acceptable quality standards. The paper offers an overview of different disciplinary approaches for looking at IAs. It suggests that risk regulation encompasses the theoretical foundations to help understand the role of IAs in the EU decisionmaking process. The analysis of 60 early days preliminary IAs provides empirical evidence regarding policy alternatives, methodology of consultation and use of quantitative techniques. Findings suggest that dawn period IAs were used mainly to provide some empirical evidence for regulatory intervention in front of stakeholders. The paper concludes with assumptions about the future role of IAs at EU level.

The first five years of the EU Impact Assessment system: a risk economics perspective on gaps between rationale and practice

In 2003 the European Commission started using Impact Assessment (IA) as the main empirical basis for its major policy proposals. The aim was to systematically assess ex ante the economic, social and environmental impacts of EU policy proposals. In parallel, research proliferated in search for theoretical grounds for IAs and in an attempt to evaluate empirically the performance of the first sets of IAs produced by the European Commission. This paper combines conceptual and evaluative studies carried out in the first five years of EU IAs. It concludes that the great discrepancy between rationale and practice calls for a different theoretical focus and a higher emphasis on evaluating empirically crucial risk economics aspects of IAs, such as the value of statistical life, price of carbon, the integration of macroeconomic modelling and scenario analysis.