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Written by Dr Eamonn Butler
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Sunday, 05 August 2007 |
I commend a new CPS report
by Keith Boyfield, on regulation. According to the government, "the
cost of regulation to the UK economy is between 10% and 12% of GDP – or
over £100bn – similar to the annual take in income tax". And I fear
that regulation is doing for business what income tax does for hard
work.
Because of the rising cost, Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIAs) were
introduced in 1998. The idea was to do a cost-benefit analysis on
regulation proposals, so that they would not get adopted if they did
more harm than good.
Fat chance. Boyfield's research finds that RIAS are regarded as a
bureaucratic chore rather than something that shapes policy. There are
few incentives to do them well. Only a third of them involve proper
cost-benefit analysis. They are too often used to justify regulation
rather than to keep it in check. Random political baggage like the
'sustainable development' imperative gum up the process. There is
little evaluation of whether regulations actually achieve their
purpose. Parliament has failed in to scrutinize the situation.
What's to be done? Well, says Boyfield, it would be nice to have all
the RIAs together on one website so people who're worried about
regulatory proposals can find them and critique them. The civil service
needs a best-practice manual to make sure RIAs are done properly. Good
RIA work should be rewarded. Maybe the whole process should be
contracted out to cost-benefit specialists.
Then, regulations should be reviewed afterwards to see if they have
actually worked and are still cost-effective. And sunset laws would
give Parliament a chance of debating whether existing regulations are
really worth renewing.
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Written by Tim Worstall
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Sunday, 22 July 2007 |
We are indeed so, so, lucky to have those wise people in Brussels taking care of things for us. The latest is an analysis (and then some proposed actions) on the subject of the gender pay gap. From a quick reading, two major points stand out.
The first is the headline announcement that the gender pay gap is 15%
across the Union. While they acknowledge, in notes, that there is a
different incidence of part- and full- time working between the sexes
they don't point out that part-time wages per hour are everywhere lower
than full-time wages per hour. So they are lumping in together two
entirely discreet pay gaps and calling it the gender pay gap: in other
words their headline figure is nonsense. The second is:
The pay gap has a major impact on the status of women in
economic and social life throughout their working lives and beyond. It
constitutes an obstacle to equal economic independence for women and
men. It has an inevitable impact on individual choice, with regard for
example to work patterns, length of working life, career breaks or the
sharing of domestic and family responsibilities.
Quite breathtaking really: a complete confusion between cause and
effect. As research shows, never married women with no children
actually have a 3% in their favour pay gap, lesbians suffer no pay gap:
it isn't that the pay gap causes the changes in time in the workforce,
but changes in time in the workforce cause the pay gap.
So the proposed actions, affecting an entire continent's worth of 450
million people, are based on a simple inability to understand the
evidence in front of them.
Can we leave yet?
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Written by Tim Worstall
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Thursday, 05 July 2007 |
Apologies for my near monomania but I do love to point out that our
politicians and rulers do not always make the very finest decisions
about how to spend the tax money that they so gleefully extract from
us. As reported in The Times
, Franco Frattini, the European Union's Justice Commissioner, thinks
that censoring the internet in order to stop wannabe terrorists from
learning how to make bombs would be a good idea. Leave aside the
freedom of expression and civil liberties implications of this for a
moment (although they are sufficient in themselves to kill the idea)
and think just of the cost effectiveness:
EU officials denied that it would be impossible to track
down websites based in remote places, insisting that the local provider
based in the EU could be held to account. One said: “You always need a
provider here that gives you access to websites. They can decide
technically which websites to allow. Otherwise how would China block
internet sites? There are no technological obstacles, only legal ones.”
Again, leave aside the thought that we are looking to Chinese methods
to regulate public discourse: is there not one further obstacle, the
financial one? I asked Bruce Schneier , the security expert, how much this would cost:
It would cost an infinite amount of money, because it would be impossible to do.
Hmm, I'd say that's a fairly large obstacle, one to add to the technological and legal, wouldn't you?
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