Student blog - Inaugural Lecture | Living in a World of Rules

Professor Claudio Radaelli’s focus is regulatory reform. As a member of the European Research Council his goal is to strike the balance between “red tape and red flags” to ensure that government rules are their most effective in smoothly running society.

Radaelli starts with a bit of history about how he got into studying regulatory reform, mentioning that what attracted him was a wave of regulatory reforms from the OECD and other international organisations that got him to think about the difference between good and bad regulation.

Radaelli argues that one must critically engage with the status quo. He says the rationale of regulatory policy is to “intervene in cases where the market is not performing efficiently so that we can not only address those failures but also promote public values.

With this understanding, he lists three aspects of creating regulation:
1. Regulation does not distribute financial resources
2. Regulation sets rules
3. Key resource is knowledge of those who are regulated

Further, he says good regulation is efficient, clear, targeted, accessible, and fair. With this, he urges that governments should move from quantity of rules to quality of them. From Professor Radaelli’s lecture I have understood that “living in a world of rules” has the potential to be
incredibly beneficial and useful or convoluted and corrupt. Large regulatory bodies can greatly influence society. Thus, by learning how to navigate the world of regulatory reform effectively, we can as Professor Radaelli noted, “organise ourselves for the future”.