The regulatory state in developing countries: Redistribution and regulatory failure in Brazil

Abstract

Following the traditional doctrine of the “regulatory state”, regulatory agencies should be given very focused mandates and stay away from the politicized realm of distributive policies and decisions. An opposing perspective would state that if regulatory agencies can contribute to economic redistribution, positive results such as network expansion, economies of scale, and fiscal efficiency will ultimately lead to lower levels of regulatory failure. This article tests whether, in countries of high socio‐economic inequality, such as Brazil, the active incorporation of distributive considerations by regulatory agencies leads to lower levels of failure. Through the analysis of the activities of seven Brazilian network regulatory agencies, the article develops theory‐driven expectations and tests these expectations using crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA). It concludes that not prioritizing redistribution is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for regulatory agencies' failure. In most types of failure, a lack of priority to redistribution leads to failure when combined with low regulatory capacity and low levels of competence.

Taming the real estate boom in the EU: Pathways to macroprudential (in)action

“…We decided to perform a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) (Ragin, 2000;Schneider & Wagemann, 2012;Thomann & Maggetti, 2020) on the different cases. QCA methods have been used in recent work in international relations (Ide and Mello, 2022), political economy, public administration, and regulatory governance ranging from explaining economic belief changes of eurozone leaders (Swinkels, 2020), to EU national reform programs (Cacciatore et al, 2015) redistribution objectives of regulatory agencies (Donadelli & van der Heijden, 2024), national regulatory responses to the global financial crisis (Young & Park, 2013) and closest to the present paper, de facto independence of regulatory agencies after delegation (Maggetti, 2007). 9 The motivation for this choice of inference method is threefold: First, the limited number of EU countries that experienced a housing boom in the period of interest (17) makes a regression analysis unsuitable, while a small-N qualitative case study is not practical either.…”

Regulation and development: Theoretical contributions and empirical lessons from Latin America

“…Separating regulatory and redistributive functions (or effects) is far from straightforward, if not impossible. This issue has extremely high salience in the context of development (see Donadelli & van der Heijden, 2024, in this special issue). Latin American states have traditionally embraced a large redistributive role (Dubash & Morgan, 2013; Riesco, 2009), meaning that governments have long used a variety of tools (including but not restricted to regulations) to transfer wealth (e.g., public funds) across different societal groups.…”

“…Regulatory decisions regarding cost allocation (such as the elimination of cross‐subsidies between services) have, in the context of development, potentially large redistributive effects. Additionally, whereas debates about regulatory interventions in the “Global North” are usually about the level of universal service that customers should enjoy, in the context of development, making a service available in the first place constitutes a key regulatory and developmental objective (see Donadelli & van der Heijden, 2024, in this special issue; González & Peci, 2024, in this special issue).…”