Who controls the controllers?

Author: Yu Hui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Who is qualified to implement regulation? What can ensure that the measures taken by regulatory agencies are appropriate? If regulatory agencies engage in improper market intervention, who will correct it? What happens if regulatory agencies collude with those they regulate to seek rent together? In a word, this is the theme of the book: "Who Regulates the Regulators?" It is a question of constitutional economics. According to Buchanan's assumption, the government is not a benevolent monarch dedicated to the public good, but is no different from ordinary economic agents. Without external constraints, it is difficult to guarantee that government officials will not engage in rent-seeking. Thus, we can understand why the Ministry of Health overstepped its authority to interpret the Consumer Protection Law to exempt itself; why the "base fare" of Beijing taxis never decreases; and why the Civil Aviation Administration General always resists giving up price intervention. We cannot criticize the officials in these departments for having private interests, because as long as there are no external constraints, their "overstepping" is quite natural. Therefore, based on the fact that administrative departments have excessive power, we can infer that in China's constitutional system, there is no clear definition of the authority of administrative departments, and there is a lack of institutions and means to check and balance them. The facts of the reform of administrative approval systems in the past two years have further proven that the idea of relying on administrative departments to reform themselves is doomed to fail. The key problem with China's approval system is not the number of approval items, but the actual power of administrative departments to self-authorize the "creation" of these approval items. Therefore, the fundamental reform of the approval system is a constitutional reform, which means depriving administrative departments of the power to self-authorize within the discretion granted to them by the constitution.