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.

Corporations’ use and misuse of evidence to influence health policy: a case study of sugar-sweetened beverage taxation

“…Third, the critical appraisal of Oxford Economics’ report [58] was undertaken by evaluating assumptions, data sources, information uncertainties, and unquantified/quantified costs and benefits within economic models using the backward mapping approach outlined above [68]. The results of this analysis were used to develop the interpretive analysis.…”

Owner–manager perceptions of regulation and micro-firm performance: An exploratory view

“…While regulation is generally created for altruistic purposes, the associated burden generally falls on firms, but benefits often lie elsewhere, usually at the societal level (Fooks and Mills, 2017). Benefits to firms may include improved growth prospects/enhanced competition, which can be difficult to quantify (Djankov et al., 2006; Doran and Ryan, 2012; Liu et al., 2015).…”

Unequal Europe, unequal Brexit: How intra-European inequalities shape the unfolding and framing of Brexit

“…The first set of contributions is shaped by an evident 'methodological nationalism', namely the 'territorial limitation which confines the study of social processes to the political and geographic boundaries of a particular nation-state' (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003: 578). In this first set of analyses, Brexit is mostly understood as a phenomenon caused by British factors, such as neoliberal restructuring of the national labour markets (Hearn, 2017;Jessop, 2017;Taylor-Gooby, 2017) and the socio-economic effects of this on British nationals (Bachtler and Begg, 2017;Farnsworth, 2017;Fooks and Mills, 2017;Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2017). Other contributions addressing the motivations and demography of the Brexit vote also focus on British and, to a lesser extent, Commonwealth nationals who were eligible to vote (Antonucci et al, 2017;Flemmen and Savage, 2017).…”