Regulating Risk
How Private Information Shapes Global Safety Standards

Companies exploit safety to acquire stricter regulations on products, boosting patented alternatives and creating barriers to competition.

Rebecca L. Perlman (Author)

9781009291934, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 June 2023

227 pages, 9 b/w illus. 15 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.503 kg

'Regulating Risk is an important book for everyone interested in global regulation and governance. It shows how producers use their advantage in scientific information to strategically shape the information environment of regulators - and results in policies that steer consumer purchases to high profit areas. This is good for producers, bad for consumers and developing countries, and poses a real dilemma for both national and international regulation.' Duncan Snidal, Nuffield College, Oxford

When governments impose stringent regulations that impede domestic competition and international trade, should we conclude that this is a deliberate attempt to protect industry or an honest effort to protect the population? Regulating Risk offers a third possibility: that these regulations reflect producers' ability to exploit private information. Combining extensive data and qualitative evidence from the pesticide, pharmaceutical, and chemical sectors, the book demonstrates how companies have exploited product safety information to win stricter standards on less profitable products for which they offer a more profitable alternative. Companies have additionally supported regulatory institutions that, while intended to protect the public, also help companies use information to eliminate less profitable products more systematically, creating barriers to commerce that disproportionally disadvantage developing countries. These dynamics play out not only domestically but also internationally, under organizations charged with providing objective regulatory recommendations. The result has been the global legitimization of biased regulatory rules.

1. The informational origins of regulatory barriers
2. Private information in the regulation of risk
3. A theory of regulatory barriers
4. Seeking stricter standards
5. How precaution begets bias
6. The internationalization of bias
7. Challenging barriers.

Subject Areas: International economic & trade law [LBBM], Political economy [KCP], International economics [KCL], International relations [JPS]