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- Title
An Equity Blindspot: The Incidence of Regulatory Costs.
- Authors
Cecot, Caroline
- Abstract
The Biden administration has made equity a priority when issuing regulations, encouraging agencies to ensure that their regulations appropriately benefit and do not inappropriately burden disadvantaged groups. But scholarly examinations of agencies' practices to date on understanding the distributional consequences of their regulations and on promoting equity have revealed significant gaps. In particular, agencies pay very little attention to the incidence of the costs of their regulations. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, rarely considers the incidence of regulatory costs among disadvantaged groups, despite being an agency that conducts relatively complete benefit–cost analyses and explicitly analyzes environmental justice implications of its regulations. But this cost-blindness is a mistake; it presents a missed opportunity to use the current equity-focused momentum to make real improvements for disadvantaged groups that could have long-lasting effects. This essay calls for agencies to give more attention to the incidence of regulatory costs in order to identify needs and opportunities for grants and investments to disadvantaged groups. This approach could provide much-needed direction for a program like the Biden administration's Justice40 initiative.
- Subjects
BIDEN, Joe, 1942-; UNITED States. Environmental Protection Agency; COST benefit analysis; ENVIRONMENTAL justice; ENVIRONMENTAL law; PRESIDENTIAL administrations; REGULATORY impact analysis; COST
- Publication
Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, 2023, Vol 14, Issue 1, p35
- ISSN
2152-2812
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/bca.2023.3