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Reducing the regulatory burden: Does firm size matter?

Industry Commission staff research paper

This paper by Ian Bickerdyke and Ralph Lattimore, was released in December 1997.

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  • Contents

Preliminaries
Cover, Copyright, Contents, Foreword, Abbreviations, Glossary, Overview

1   Introduction
1.1   The regulatory burden
1.2   Scope of the report
1.3   Structure of the report

2   Benefits and costs of regulations
2.1   The need for government intervention
2.2   Regulatory costs imposed on businesses
2.3   Concluding remarks

3   Recent policies for reducing the regulatory burden
3.1   General policies for easing regulatory requirements and reducing tax compliance costs
3.2   Government approaches to reducing the small business regulatory burden
3.3   Interpreting the focus on small business
3.4   Concluding remarks

4   Differential regulations for small businesses - an economic framework
4.1   An economic framework for regulatory impacts
4.2   Tiering of regulatory requirements
4.3   Flexibility of regulatory delivery
4.4   Distributional and fairness issues
4.5   Concluding remarks

5   Regulatory compliance costs across firm sizes - the evidence
5.1   How significant are economies of scale in regulatory compliance?
5.2   Do regulatory compliance costs significantly increase unit costs in small businesses?
5.3 Are there cases where there is little substitution between large and small scale modes of production?
5.4   Data problems and non-compliance
5.5   Concluding remarks

6   Perceptions of the regulatory burden across firm sizes
6.1   Overview
6.2   Which aspects of the regulatory burden are the most important?
6.3   The overall regulatory burden
6.4   Concluding remarks

7   Policy issues and regulatory design
7.1   Policy issues
7.2   Regulatory design guidelines
7.3   Areas for further research

APPENDICES

A   The economic significance of small business

B   The theory of regulatory tiering

C   US federal legislation relating to small business regulation

D   Surveys of firms' perceptions

E   Principles of regulation design

References

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