Regulatory lessons from the leaky home experience

Abstract

I begin this paper with a manufacturer’s warning: that I use the term ‘regulation’ slightly differently from the way it is used in some other papers presented in this symposium, coming as I do as an economist from the tradition of mathematical systems analysis. By that tradition’s standards, a market is a regulatory system, so it finds limiting the use of the term ‘regulation’ to just statutes and the regulations that are derived from them. It also recognises that some administrative practices are regulatory. The legal framework for regulation may be quite adequate but the administrators may fail to implement it effectively. So when I write about the global financial crisis being a result of regulatory failure I am allowing that the law, the market and the administration may all have had a role in that failure.