Regulate in Haste Repent at Leisure-Comments from India and EU

I have used this title for another post  under the label Telecom Regulation, but I feel compelled to use it again.

 I read a very interesting article in the Financial Express yesterday. It is called, “A little less lazy pragmatism please” While its focus is monetary policy, it makes an interesting observation which applies across the board,

“In India, we have largely abandoned basing policy and reforms on theory and empirical evidence. Instead, we have chosen to justify badly structured ad hoc policy changes on pragmatism and reality.”

It also states that,the label 

“…Only when policies are based on theory and empirics and not on the insiders’ insistence on pragmatism does market efficiency increase.”

I agree wholeheartedly with this thinking. I believe that In India policy making and regulation could benefit greatly from sound theoretical and empirical analysis rather than the current trend of short cuts and literally what the author of the above mentioned article calls “lazy pragmatism”. Correcting this problem calls for greater role of subject specialists in policy making. They are in fact slowly being allowed into the Government regardless of a  bureaucracy who believe they are smart enough to manage anything through a common sense approach and don’t a theoretical basis for their decision making. 

It is interesting to note that  BEREC, the body of European electronic communications regulators has come out in similar criticism of the European Commission’s draft regulation on a single telecoms market. Please see my post titled “Bold Brave Telecom Reforms in EU.”

They are quoted to have said that, they fear that these proposed reforms will be “rushed through the European legislature without proper explanation and full exploration of its potential consequences….. the proposals represent an aggregation of several unrelated measures, whereas the EU Framework is a complex regulatory ecosystem that should be approached as a coherent whole.” It is said that “BEREC is concerned that the draft regulation will jeopardise the integrity of the EU framework and its achievements, in terms of investment, competition and consumer benefit.“

Given that EU’s regulatory framework for electronic communications is indeed an excellent one so far I would hope that they are not right.