Credibility and independence in Belgian competition and regulatory policies

In this paper we attempt to analyze the independence and credibility of five Belgian regulatory agencies. In the theoretical part we cover the existing literature and find that although independence and credibility are different phenomena independence is usually used as a proxy for credibility. In the empirical part we therefore concentrate on the independence of Belgian regulatory agencies using the framework constructed by Johannsen (2004). In this framework four aspects of independence are identified and quantified leading to an overall independence index. Using legal analysis this framework is applied to the Belgian situation. We find that the independence of the Belgian financial regulator is very high, while the railway regulator is lacking most features of independence. The other regulators (the competition authority, the energy and telecommunications regulators) score somewhere in between. The overall picture is one of inconsistency.