Understanding Regulation

The need to regulate certain aspects of the market economy is widely acknowledged.There are now many agencies in India, which use institutional and legal mechanisms to do this. Though regulation is intimately related to law, it goes beyond it. A large body of the standard literature on regulation has grown organically in response to the markets in the United States and Western Europe. The fourteen papers in this volume try to understand the specific context within which regulation has unfolded in India, under circumstances which are very different from those in the United States and Western Europe. It also dwells on how these regulatory issues flow across national boundaries and affect the international arena in this age of globalization. While some papers discuss conceptual issues others engage with how the political economy affects regulation both in terms of domestic political economy and in relation to pressures from international organizations. Banning the import of carpets, which use child labour, is a case in point. Yet other papers discuss some specific sectors in the economy which are regulated, such as finance and banking, telecommunications and competition policy, in relation to the problem of regulation itself.