Regulatory costs in profile

Better understanding of the scope and incidence of compliance costs should facilitate more rational debate about the role and effects of government and better targeting of efforts to improve government oversight. However, benefits assessments - a companion task well beyond the limits of this study - also must be undertaken before balanced judgments can be reached about the merits of any particular regulation. A few caveats are necessary. Unlike the situation with government taxing and spending programs, no comprehensive cost accounting system exists for regulation. It generally is less easy to discern who bears how much costs from regulatory compliance than in true for other governmental actions. The regulatory cost estimates that appear in this paper lay no claim to precision; both conceptual and empirical challenges make precision unattainable. Rather, the paper offers general profiles of the costs of our regulatory system, reflecting judgments about the scope of regulations covered as well as the distribution of their costs by firm size. In moving beyond this preview, the paper describes the array and cost of regulations, explains how it allocates these regulatory costs across sectors of the economy, and discusses the resulting patterns of regulatory compliance burdens.