The Rise of the Regulatory State in Europe

Regulation of the competitive behaviour of the privatized industries is further strengthened by the availability of the competition law of the European Community which offers considerably more powerful remedies than are available under British law. A paradoxical consequence of the international debate about privatization and deregulation has been to focus the attention of European policy makers and scholars on regulation as a distinctive mode of state intervention in the economy and society. Deregulation often means less restrictive or rigid regulation: a search for ways of achieving the relevant regulatory objectives by less burdensome methods of government intervention, as when command-and-control methods are replaced by economic incentives. In a useful survey paper on &s;Regulation in Theory and Practice&s;, J. Joskow and G. Noll call &s;normative analysis as a positive theory&s; the theory which regards market failure as the motivating reason for the introduction of public regulation.