"We think we can cut regulations by 75 percent." President Trump said in 2017. "We're going to be cutting regulation massively" but the rules will be "just as protective of the people."
Is that possible? Has any high-income democracy accomplished that? The US is not the first to seek “massive” regulatory reform. Countries with highly developed administrative procedures have taken on this gargantuan task. South Korea cut almost 50% of its business regulations (over 5,500 regulations) in 11 months in 1998, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis. In the 1990s, Australia launched a major overhaul of Federal and State regulation that it thought was needed if the nation was to compete in world markets. Taking unprecedented joint action, the Heads of Government of Australia's Federal, State and Territory Governments adopted in 1994 a National Competition Policy (NCP), a massive regulatory review program based on competition principles. The Netherlands, starting in 2007, launched a national program to cut paperwork costs by a nett 25%, a target adopted by the Cabinet. Thailand launched in 1998 a 2 year review of over 1,000 licensing restrictions. Trump is now back in 2025 with a 1 in, ten out cost framework.
This paper will look at these experiences and others to assess the design, legitimacy, ambition and speed of the reforms, and draw lessons. It will examine how process-based reform (reform that is organized along conventional lines of rulemaking) compares to principle-based reform (reform that proceeds by judging regulations against clear standards of quality and good practice using independent assessment and top-down directives). It will conclude with ideas about how large-scale reform processes can be designed to produce economic results in the market more much more quickly, while respecting constitutional and administrative norms such as political accountability, policy effectiveness, stakeholder consultation, legal coherence, and economic analysis.
