Regulatory Impact Assessment in Mexico: A Story of Interest Groups Pressure

Over the last decade, many developing countries have adopted the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA). Despite the promise of bringing economic development, the results have been largely disappointing. The conventional wisdom is that the lack of administrative capacity and data availability are the two main reasons behind this failure. However, an in-depth analysis of two recent high-impact RIAs performed by Mexican authorities reveals that regulatory capture might be an additional and significant problem. In both cases, RIAs appear as merely instrumental to confer a scientific aura to the political rhetoric supporting a regulation that favored a specific interest group. In this vein, absent a sufficiently strong system of checks and balances, a greater sophistication of government officials might paradoxically reduce accountability and transparency. In the last section, we briefly sketch a possible reform aimed at preventing this risk, namely the introduction of a supranational non-binding process of appeal against especially relevant RIAs.