Unveiling the Features of a Regulatory System: The Institutional Grammar of Tobacco Legislation in Mexico

Abstract

The United Nations will host a drug policy summit in 2016. This will be a good forum to evaluate the effectiveness of existing legal frameworks. The institutional grammar tool can help with such evaluation. This article uses the tool to analyze the inherent features of tobacco regulations in Mexico. The analysis shows that the legal framework seeks to curb consumption with a combination of information and choice rules, and administrative penalties. As the analysis reveals, the usefulness of the method depends upon the availability of a solid theory that allows one to link rule features and the behavior they expect to induce.

Keywords:

• drug policy
• institutional analysis
• institutional grammar
• Mexico
• tobacco

Notes

¹ See “Resolution 66/183: International cooperation against the world drug problem” in http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/66/183&referer=/english/&Lang=E (retrieved on February 2014).

² Also see http://www.oecd.org/regreform/regulatory-policy/regulatorypolicycommittee.htm and http://www.oecd.org/governance/regulatory-policy/measuringregulatoryperformance.htm (last retrieved on March 2013).

³ In general terms, Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) can be defined as “… a systemic approach to critically assessing the positive and negative effects of proposed and existing regulations and non-regulatory alternatives. As employed in OECD countries it encompasses a range of methods. It is an important element of an evidence-based approach to policy making.” (http://www.oecd.org/gov/regulatory-policy/ria.htm; last retrieved on May 2013).

⁴ See www.iub.edu/˜workshop (last retrieved on May 2013).

⁵ There is a growing number of scholars and policy makers who consider that government measures based on prohibition and law enforcement are not rendering the expected results and that it is time to rethink the war on drugs and stop treating drug abuse solely as a subject of criminal law (Musto & Korzmeyer, 2002; Zedillo & Wheeler, 2012).

⁶ See http://www.oecd.org/governance/regulatory-policy/measuringregulatoryperformance.htm (last retrieved on March 2013).

⁷ There are various quantitative tools that can be used in evaluating the effects of regulation (see an overview of these methods in Khandker, Koolwal, and Samad, 2010).

⁸ See “World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control” in http://www.who.int/fctc/en/ (last retrieved on March 2013).

⁹ The Act (in Spanish) is available on the website of the Chamber of Deputies http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/ (last retrieved on February 2014).

¹⁰ See details about the coding procedure in the Appendix.