organizations’ public policy assistance to developing governments. RIA has become part of a regulatory reform agenda oriented not only toward good governance and evidence-based decision making, but more so towards improving the business climate and competitiveness (WBG 2010a; Zhang 2010, Kirkpatrick 2016, p. 381).

Several studies suggest mixed results, but there is no systematic account of RIA implementation in developing countries. Recent years have seen a growing number of studies about RIA in individual, or in small groups of countries, cf. Box 2 below. The studies suggest that global RIA diffusion has not led to the establishment of a single RIA model, and instead shows marked differences between countries. Having said that, the so-called “OECD model” has proven important both for the design of regulatory reforms and for evaluation of success (Zhang 2010). Most importantly, although these studies identify several factors assumed to negatively affect RIA implementation in developing countries, there is still a lack of a comprehensive overview and an explanatory framework that can explain why some RIA reforms in transition and developing countries seem deliver results remarkably fast, whereas others take considerably longer or do not succeed at all. In other words, many factors that can constrain the success of RIA reforms and the establishment of sustainable RIA systems have been identified, but these factors have not been systematized to facilitate explanatory analysis.

Box 2. Recent multi-country studies of RIA in developing countries Penev and Marušić (2011) and Staronova (2010) have looked at RIA reforms in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Their conclusions on RIA systems in these regions largely corroborate those of the joint EU/OECD SIGMA initiative and point toward scarce and casual application of RIA, markedly different patterns of implementation, and deficiencies in RIA systems, most of all in their institutional dimension. Similarly, studies from Welch (2007), Banya and Waddington (2007), and WBG (2010b) have focused on regulatory reform in East Africa. They find that positive results of RIA reforms are limited, with various different issues hindering the establishment of RIA systems.

Kirkpatrick et al. (2004) conducted a survey covering aspects of RIA systems among civil servants in 99 developing and transition economies. Out of the 40 countries responding to the survey, only 10 had a legal requirement for RIA, while 30 used RIA without explicit legal basis. The survey showed that RIA awareness was fairly satisfactory among the respondents, but that the coverage and methodologies for RIA varied greatly among countries. To evaluate the status of regulatory reform in selected transition economies between 2006 and 2007, Zhang and Thomas (2009) surveyed 11 developing countries on different aspects of regulatory governance, including RIA. They found that application of RIA was “limited and unsystematic” and RIA itself “not integrated into policy decision making”. Zhang (2010) later combined the answers of the two studies, concluding that the reviewed RIA systems were not yet contributing substantially to policy improvements.

Adelle et al. (2014 and 2016) draw on a survey among civil servants from 14 developing and transition economies. The discouraging conclusion is that “of the eight out of fourteen countries included in our survey which did have RIA systems of some form, only one RIA system (Mexico – the only OECD country in the sample) could be considered relatively well institutionalized”.

Intal and Gill (2016a and 2016b) analyzed a sample of member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The RIA record here seems far better than in previously mentioned regions. The authors still conclude that “[t]he quality of many regulatory reviews under the RIA/RIS system in many of the countries in the Project has been highly mixed, often unsatisfactory. This suggests that such systems have not been very useful and have had little impact on policymaking.” The most important challenges affecting RIA systems revolve around the analytical quality of RIA documents, their usage by political principals and the prominence of legal aspects over substantial ones.

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