Two monkey wrenches in the Russian regulatory reform

Recent issue of the European Journal of Risk Regulation includes a paper by Vladimir Kudryavtsev, Ruslan Kuchakov, and Daria Kuznetsova titled «Two monkey wrenches in the Russian regulatory reform». This paper assesses the 2016 regulatory reform in Russia.

Abstract:

The latest Russian regulatory reform (2016) sought to introduce the risk-orientated approach – a move away from the “blanket inspections” (or the risk regulation reflex – a term coined by Blanc in 2011) method that has been criticised by the Russian business community. The present paper aims to assess its success using administrative data on federal watchdogs’ inspections. We argue that this reform ultimately failed in its goal regarding the overall number of inspections, and thus the volume of regulatory burden did not change significantly throughout the reform. This failure resulted from two mechanisms. First, the legal framing of the reform radically redefined risk as the probability of incompliance (as opposed to the likelihood of accident). Second, the watchdogs used key performance indicators that incentivised “street-level” inspectors to maintain the pre-reform regulatory burden levels.