Better Regulation for Growth Governance Frameworks and Tools for Effective Regulatory Reform-Project-Level Indicators

The organization of the paper is the following. The author start from what is available on the ground: in section two the author briefly comments on the indicators actually used by the Internal Communications (IC) department at the World Bank Group and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The author fined that there is room for improvement. To show how to improve, the author approach the design of project-level indicators (in section three) by considering the most important technical dimensions of indicators and by relating design to the characteristics of the regulatory reform issues. Here the author will introduce the difference between canonical and non-canonical practices, and discuss its implications for the design of indicators. Section four introduces two major features, that is, the relationship between project-level indicators and other regulatory innovations and the distinction between the adoption of the project and its implementation. The author will argue that project-level indicators should incorporate valuable information on: (a) other regulatory reform innovations that, if present, complement and support the project; and (b) the different stages of the policy process. On point (b) the author will observe that most regulatory indicators in use track down the early stages of the policy process, such as adoption and the preparation of formal guidance, but tend to miss the implementation stage. This is crucial instead, since when the donor leaves the country, there is a risk of project atrophy if implementation is not monitored. Having shown complexity and why it matters by highlighting four 'hard questions' for project indicators designers, the author turn in section five to the proposal for regulatory indicators of a regulatory impact assessment (RIA) project, showing different forms of usage and modalities of aggregation. Section six concludes.