More work is needed to simplify regulations while preserving their benefits.
Having led on evidence-based regulatory practice for decades, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is reckoning with regulatory simplification. President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Executive Order 12,291 and subsequent U.S. executive orders on cost-benefit analysis catalyzed contemporary regulatory policy. By 2012, the OECD Regulatory Policy Committee, chaired by Australian Gary Banks, had established best practice principles for regulatory quality and impact analyses and in 2014 began to report on and compare worldwide performance in regulatory impact analysis in its Regulatory Policy Outlook.
When the OECD revisited this work in a high-level symposium in November 2025—“Simplifying for Success: smart rules, stronger business”—the results were mixed.
In a survey of 28 OECD members, the OECD found that businesses perceive a net increase in the following areas: costs incurred to comply with content obligations in regulation (53 percent); frequent changes to regulation (45 percent); lack of co-ordination between different regulatory bodies at the national level (40 percent); and unclear rules and requirements for complying with regulations (34 percent). Government respondents also doubted the cost-effectiveness of regulations—a concerning response, since these respondents are responsible for ensuring that regulations are creating net public value.
Nearly all the surveyed governments had introduced burden reduction and simplification measures but were not confident that these measures would be effective. Significantly, the use of regulatory impact analysis processes was high—with 65 percent of respondents requiring it for all or major primary laws—but at the same time, more than 90 percent of respondents cited resource constraints and data availability as barriers to using existing methodologies to assess regulatory costs and benefits. Although artificial intelligence and digital tools promise to streamline bureaucratic processes, the uptake in this survey was relatively low—less than 50 percent—with problems with information technology interoperability cited as a major hurdle (53 percent).
Instead of the regulatory parsimony recommended by Neil Gunningham’s smart regulation design principles, the OECD found “creeping regulatory complexity.” Regulatory impact analysis, although powerful, is not a “do-all” tool. This was underscored by the survey finding that only 31 percent of respondent states require ex-post reviews of regulation—in other words, nearly 70 percent of the regulation being produced is never evaluated post-launch.
Advanced and middle-income economies have been battling the rise in regulatory volume and its impact for decades. Vincent Chiao has termed it “hyerplexis.” The RegData method for quantifying legislation, which considers not just the volume of regulation but the extent to which it constrains activity, has become increasingly influential. Cary Coglianese and several coauthors have critiqued the limits of this approach, noting that many rules create public value— a point now acknowledged in the methodology for the World Bank’s Business Ready index. Nevertheless, industry associations around the world continue to lobby for the reduction of “regulatory burden”—which they typically define as the time and money costs to business of complying with regulation. Increasingly this also means the time and psychological burden of navigating dense and conflicting regulatory requirements and marshalling disparate parts of government to coordinate their decisions where approval from more than one agency is required.
Regulatory, or legislative, complexity is something different. Recent Australian scholarship defines complexity based on the total amount of regulations, how quickly they change, and how easy they are to understand. The Australian Law Reform Commission found that legislation governing corporations and financial services amounts to more than 47,000 pages of rules and guidance—something a federal court judge has famously described as “legislative porridge.” The commission’s 2023 report makes significant recommendations on redesigning financial services legislation by consolidating definitions of key terms, creating a clear legislative hierarchy, and including thematic consolidated rulebooks for regulating products, persons, service or circumstances—measures to put all the relevant obligations in one place.
The “red-tape reduction” approach to complexity is also alive and well. In the United States, the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has disassembled whole agencies, leadership teams, or regulatory functions. Agencies in the United States have also extensively used executive orders to announce rule changes without notice and comment, much less benefit-cost analysis. Would-be reformers outside the United States are taking note of these developments. At the OECD’s high-level symposium on regulatory simplification in November 2025, a few political leaders—most, though not all, on the right—lined up, promising to “fix” regulatory complexity and free business from the shackles of too many rules standing in the way of economic growth.
The OECD itself is taking a more measured approach. The organization’s new initiative, Simplifying for Success, launched in April 2025, is an attempt to retain the focus on the value of regulation in producing public goods while assuaging often-legitimate criticisms from business that the regulatory environment is just too difficult and too costly to navigate. In support of that work, I spoke at the high-level symposium about two examples of simplification work currently underway in Australia.
The Australian Department of Finance, which houses the Regulatory Reform teams for the government, launched a Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill in 2025. The bill was passed with 60 measures covering the operations of 13 government agencies. In particular, the bill accelerates the move toward a “tell-us-once” approach to how the service delivery arm of the government collects and uses information. The Omnibus approach is likely to become a routine way of enacting system improvements.
With colleagues at RegNet, the School of Regulation and Global Governance within the Australian National University, I led the development of new diagnostic tool, RegValue, that enables public servants to do a “whole of regulatory system” scan for indicators of regulatory value and the rules and practices that diminish that value by creating friction or imposing economic or psychic burdens on system participants and users. Having piloted it in one jurisdiction, we are now developing the user guide and planning national testing.
This tool enables different types of system stakeholders—including government and business—to agree on what is valuable about a regulatory framework and then look at how to improve the public value that it was intended to deliver. The RegValue tool is not a replacement for regulatory impact analysis, but it is a promising, low-cost approach for system stewards to do a health-check on their existing systems to identify where updates or additional work may be required.
At Australia’s National Regulators Community of Practice national conference in October 2023, ASIC Commissioner Kate O’Rourke spoke about the significant work being done by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Australia’s corporate regulator, on simplification. ASIC defines “simplification” as “making it easier to find regulatory information, interact with ASIC, and understand regulatory obligations. It supports effective enforcement, reduces unnecessary burden, and helps consumers, investors, and businesses make informed decisions.”
In 2025, ASIC’s efforts to simplify included several measures: consultation with users about how ASIC could better structure its regulatory guidance; a new, improved website; surveying directors of small businesses to understand their information needs and how ASIC can best communicate with them; and developing sector-specific how-to guides or regulatory roadmaps, including guides focusing on directors of small companies and financial advice providers. ASIC distinguishes “simplification” from “red tape reduction,” the latter requiring legal reforms of the rules themselves.
All of these efforts seem arduous. Why would an advanced economy spend resources on regulatory simplification? First, productivity. As Australia’s national Economic Reform Roundtable in August 2025 pinpointed, regulation and regulatory practices are the new frontier in lifting productivity for mature economies. Second, competitiveness. Foreign investors are vocal about regulatory systems that are difficult to navigate, and simplification offers a lens and a vocabulary for addressing those concerns without abandoning national interest. And finally, democratic practice. Regulatory complexity that is careless or accidental fails the rule of law requirement that the law be knowable in advance by citizens or does not exceed human reading and comprehension capability. Outsourcing the solution to a privately owned provider of artificial intelligence AI technologies is tempting but unlikely to satisfy fundamental requirements of democracy and the rule of law.
This essay is part of a series, titled “Regulatory Simplification Around the Globe.”
