William Beach, Parker Sheppard
This paper adds to existing evidence about the cost of increasing regulation in foregone economic growth and highlights the issue for policymakers. The effects of growing regulation on the pace of economic growth should be front and center in our economic policy discussions.
Our contribution presents economic growth estimates based on the largest available text-based regulation dataset. We find that regulatory growth has inhibited economic growth, which implies that Americans would likely see their incomes rise if the number of regulations were to fall. We illustrate the size of the effect by comparing an unconditional forecast in which regulations grow as expected with a conditional forecast in which the number of regulations is held constant.
Our results suggest that the increase in economic output from simply freezing regulation exceeds the effects from a simple extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that is currently being debated in Congress. Our estimates suggest that regulatory reform and deregulation should join tax reform as major policy issues in the 119th Congress.
Recent Economic Literature Highlights the Costs of Regulation
The discussion among academic economists of how regulations affect economic performance stretches at least as far back as Arthur Pigou and Nahid Aslanbeigui’s positive assessment of regulation in The Economics of Welfare (1938).REF However, more recent views have shifted to a more skeptical if not outright negative assessment of regulation’s economic effects. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2005) emphasize the effects on growth from differences in regulatory regimes as elements in larger institutional factors shaping growth.REF Antonio Ciccone and Elias Papaioannou (2007) reflect the earlier literature that focused on regulatory bureaucracy and its ill effects on firm formation and growth.REF
More recently, economists have produced quantitative estimates of how much regulations affect growth. W. Mark Crain and Nicole V. Crain (2014) developed economy-wide burden estimates that weighed down the U.S. » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/reducing-regulations-produces-strong-economic-growth-responses