The Drivers of Deregulation in the Era of Globalization

This paper treats the question to what extent globalization trends restrict a countryspecific regulation policy in industrial countries. The empirical analysis makes use of recently collected regulation indicators for four policy fields: financial market, product markets, labour markets and trade. After a short discussion of the link between globalization and deregulation and a descriptive view at the correlations, a panel analysis for OECD countries for the period 1975 to 2001 is executed. The evidence shows that globalization in the narrow sense of trade openness and capital mobility has a rather limited impact as an immediate driver of deregulation. However, in a wider sense globalization definitions also comprise the easier flow of knowledge and information across borders resulting in more effective cross-border learning processes. Acknowledgement: I thank Thomas Helbling, IMF, for kindly providing me with the regulation indicators. JEL-Classification: E 63, H00