The emergence of regulatory regionalism: transnational networks and the diffusion of regulatory agencies within regions

Abstract

The regulatory regionalism approach has increasingly claimed that a new mode of regional governance is emerging globally. Regional policy regimes, developed in broad social and economic territorial areas, affect the internal transformation of the state. The authors plan to provide comprehensive empirical evidence about the emergence of worldwide regulatory regionalism by identifying how regulatory agencies have diffused very successfully within the regional level in recent decades. The paper aims to identify, using an original methodological design, the ways in which such diffusion of agencies occurred, as this may have theoretical relevance for the study of regulatory regionalism. The authors' hypothesis suggests that transnational political interactions in each regional cluster triggered agency diffusion, contributing to the development of the regulatory state within the countries of each region. To test this hypothesis, the authors employed a data set of regulatory agencies including the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), and most Asian and Latin American countries (+59) from 1950 to 2007, for 15 sectors related to finance, risks, utility and competition. Bayesian data analysis was used to estimate the parameters of interest.

Keywords:

• regulatory regionalism
• regulatory agencies
• policy diffusion
• transnational networks
• regional governance
• regional integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [grant number CSO2012-39693].

Notes

1. The original data set on the establishment of regulatory agencies was developed jointly by Jordana et al. (2011). For the purposes of this paper, here we expanded the data set to 10 countries more. For a more detailed description of the data set, see the codebook at http://globalreg.eu/cps-2011.

2. Mexico is a member of both the Latin American group and the OECD. Japan and South Korea are members of both the Asian group and the OECD. One of the countries in the data set, the Slovak Republic, is included only for the period 1993–2007.

3. We use the legal date of creation or the date of issuance of the law or ordinance, not the initial operations date, to define the creation of a regulatory agency.

4. There are a few cases of missing values. GDP per capita is not available for some countries during the first years of the 1950s. In this case, the values have been imputed from a linear regression of the time trend of GDP per capita (logged) for each specific country.

5. The distinction between different types of IGOs (economic, social, general and defence) is adopted from Ingram, Robinson, and Busch (2005). We take into account only economic IGOs, as far as they refer more directly to organizations related to the areas of regulatory governance. However, models not reported show stability in the results if, instead of a weighting matrix by shared membership in economic IGOs, other indicators are used, such as shared membership in the OECD, or shared membership in regional integration organizations (including the following cases: Andean Community, NAFTA, MERCOSUR, European Union, ASEAN).

6. The proportion of exports as opposed to imports has been checked in non-reported models, with no substantial changes for the results in our model.