Chaque mois sur euradio, retrouvez une interview d'un·e chercheur·se en sciences sociales, menée par Lola Avril, chercheuse en sciences politiques.
Bonjour et bienvenue dans Parlons régulation, les politiques européennes en questions. Je suis Lola Avril et pour cette troisième saison, nous discutons tous les mois avec des chercheuses et chercheurs en sciences sociales des rapports de force et dynamiques contemporaines qui structurent la production des politiques européennes.
Cette année nous essaierons donc de comprendre ce qu’il se cache derrière la notion de « régulation » et quels sont les outils déployés pour mettre un oeuvre un nouvel agenda dérégulateur.
Pour ce quatrième épisode, j'ai le plaisir de discuter avec Max Molden, doctorant en philosophie à l’université de Hambourg, qui travaille notamment sur les modalités d’intervention de l’Etat dans l’économie. Hello Max.
Hello, bonjour. Thank you very much for having me.
Max, in the past month, we have heard a lot about deregulation, particularly in the European context, where the so-called simplification agenda is often presented and perceived as a form of deregulation. And my first question would be what exactly is deregulation? Is it simply the opposite of regulation?
Well, let's quickly start by saying that economists distinguish regulation from other kinds of actions that governments can do. So when we have government regulation, that is a certain subset of government action. It's a subset that can also be subsumed under the heading of government intervention. And regulation then simply refers to these kinds of like product and price regulations. For instance, if you have a minimum wage, that is a classic instance of regulation. And to some extent, it's very simple. And you can simply say that, well, deregulation then means that we have, that the government lifts something that it has regulated before. So it's simply a lift, a lifting of regulation. But things may not be that simple if we look at it in more detail.
And actually in a recent article published in the Independent Review, you show that there are in fact several types of deregulation. Could you explain that? What are these types?
First, let's distinguish between partial deregulation and complete deregulation. Now if we have complete deregulation, then we can say all the benefits and all the regulatory benefits, all the regulatory burdens that have existed go away. So there is no longer any regulation if we completely deregulate. But there can also be partial deregulation. And this is, if I may add, that what we usually see in the world. And this partial deregulation is special because it interacts with the kind of interrelatedness of regulations. Now, I distinguish then five types of partial deregulation, where we can think of first the case that a regulation has simply been ineffective. So it didn't touch on anything that people would really do. So you can just deregulate and nothing changes.
And then, there's secondly the case that you have an independent regulation. And if you deregulate that, this means that there is a decrease of the regulatory effect. So no longer is there any regulation. No longer the burdens or the benefits, they vanish. But then, and this is the spicy part, there can be a lifting of interacting regulations. And this may then mean that the regulatory effect decreases, stays the same, neutral, or, and this is I think the most interesting stuff, it may actually increase the regulatory effect and especially the regulatory burden. If you think of regulation and then deregulation, you simply think that it is like a very easy one-off way. So either deregulation is good or it's bad, depending on your perspective on politics, perhaps, or on the economy, and the same holds for regulation. It's just like, yeah, inverse relationship, if you will. But the kind of idea that I'm trying to develop is that you can imagine that there is a, something like a balance between different kinds of regulations that are in place in the economy.
One other thing is that we often refer to the risks of regulatory capture, especially in European policies, for example. So regulatory capture means situations in which private actors capture the decision-making process, the regulations for their own benefits. But in your recent article, you introduce also the idea of deregulatory capture. What does this mean exactly?
Yes. So you already touched on regulatory capture, and deregulatory capture simply is the twin idea or concept, if you will. What I was trying to describe by the interrelated regulations and then deregulation, which may increase the regulatory burden and be in the interest of the banks, which are then easier, able to, engage in risky behavior while they still can count on being bailed out by the government. This kind of stuff makes it interesting for companies to capture the process of deregulation. Let's imagine that you have a benevolent government that is trying to deregulate the economy because it is convinced that this is fostering the economic growth or the productivity of the economy. So they think this is good. But then you have the influence of interest groups, and this would be like the regulated sector, so companies in the regulated sector. And they are trying to capture this process of deregulation in their interest. And this is what I mean by deregulatory capture. Which can shed light, I think, on what we may be witnessing in the world today.
If we turn now to the European Union, which is the interest of this podcast, since the last elections, we have observed a growing emphasis on simplification, the reduction of administrative burden. My question would be, how does your analytical framework about different types of regulation, deregulatory captures can help us to make sense? Of this current political moment in Europe?
So that's a great question. And it's not easy for me to answer that. So I ask the reader to be very careful or to take my remarks as very cautious, because I don't want to be too bold. But what is important is that when you have someone like Mario Draghi, who wrote this report, I think that... Listeners to this podcast are probably familiar. He was perhaps, or probably, very genuinely attempting to do something good and to improve the European economy. But what my framework at least suggests is that there is the danger that the kinds of simplification and deregulation initiative that the EU under Ursula von der Leyen is trying to push forward... May not do good, because just because you deregulate doesn't mean that the regulatory burden decreases. It may also mean that regulatory benefits vanish from deregulation. My framework allows us to be very careful and to avoid the simplistic and, I think, false inference. So you said that deregulation, so economy is growing or we have less regulatory burden. And I think, at the very least, this kind of contextualization is possible.
Un entretien réalisé par Lola Avril.
