Measuring the Employment Effects of Regulation

An increasing amount of attention has been focused on the employment effect of governmental regulation. Controversy over the implementation and impacts of governmental rules are now central to current public policy debates relating to employment and labor markets. A new policy framework for regulation is needed to make the regulatory decision-making process more responsive to the requirements for economic growth and to the employment effects of regulation. The President and Congress need to provide effective oversight of the process, from the perspective of both a single regulation and a government-wide approach to regulatory planning. Regulatory agencies need to use state-of-the-art analytical tools so that they can better determine the employment effects of their regulatory actions. This book presents a common-sense, albeit highly sophisticated and technical, approach to improving the technical soundness, credibility, and transparency of the regulatory decision-making process.

NEAL S. ZANK is a consultant and Research Associate at the Center for Global Management and Research at the George Washington University. He is co-author of Reforming Financial Systems: Policy Changes and Privatization (Greenwood, 1991) and Welfare System Reform: Coordinating Federal, State, and Local Public Assistance Programs (Greenwood, 1993), and has written numerous articles on job training, foreign aid, and international economic issues. Mr. Zank was Associate Director of the National Commission for Employment Policy (1990-1993), and a staff member for two Presidential commissions and the U.S. Agency for International Development.