The tolerable cost of European Union regulation:leaving the EU and the market for politically convenient facts

Abstract

European Union (EU) law-making has played a key role in promoting social equity in the UK through safer working conditions, enhanced rights for workers, and by reducing environmental pollution. Concerns over its effect on business competitiveness have long been a major driver of Euroscepticism, underpinning criticism of the EU by influential opinion formers within British conservatism. The Leave Campaign argued that EU laws damage the UK economy by imposing unnecessary costs on British business, claiming that EU regulations cost the UK economy £33.3 billion per year. This paper examines the reliability of, and assumptions that underpin, aggregated estimates of the costs and benefits of EU-derived regulation, and considers how the economisation of public policy influences understanding of the social value of regulation. It brings together the findings of studies that have evaluated the accuracy of the estimated costs and benefits in formal impact assessments and analyses impact assessments of EU-derived policy instruments aimed at regulating working conditions. Our findings suggest that aggregated estimates represent poor guides to understanding the social costs and benefits of social regulation and highlight the value of discarding impact assessment estimates of costs and benefits in the context of efforts to shape social policy post-Brexit.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279417000526
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Sociology and Policy
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Centre for Critical Inquiry into Society and Culture (CCISC)
Additional Information: © Cambridge University Press 2017. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: in press,Social Sciences (miscellaneous),Public Administration,Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Publication ISSN: 1469-7823
Last Modified: 18 Mar 2024 08:21
Date Deposited: 22 Aug 2017 11:30
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://www.cam ... 355604D0CB7D92C (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2017-10-01
Published Online Date: 2017-07-20
Accepted Date: 2017-07-20
Authors: Fooks, Gary (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-0080-4802)
Mills, Tom (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-1389-7577)

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