The moral paradigm: Reconciliation of efficiency and justice principles in regulatory decision-making

The economic agents’ surging demand for a human-centric approach of the government authorities, and the dissatisfaction with the efficiency of managerial decisions taken in the face of numerous external challenges (the pandemic, digitalisation, and sanctions pressure) determine the need to search for the new foundations of state’s regulatory policy. The research rethinks the longstanding public economic discussion on the concepts “efficiency” and “justice”. The methodology of the study is the nexus of concepts of economic analysis of law, institutional economics, and moral economics, which uses a bio-socio-economic model of a person and relies on humanistic values. The methods are the logical deductive method and the semantic analysis employed to explore the key concepts. The article traces the evolution of economic and legal views on efficiency and justice with regard to the regulation of economic relations. The paper justifies the possibility of convergence of the phenomena under discussion in terms of their application while taking regulatory decisions within the moral economics paradigm by embedding justice as a component of the target condition of the socioeconomic system. To evaluate the regulatory decisions, the paper proposes using the concept of socioeconomic, or public, efficiency, which should be understood as the ability of a regulation to achieve a socially significant goal while upholding the generally accepted principles of justice and morality through the optimal use of available limited resources.