Lainsäädännön kilpailuvaikutusten arviointi

Executive Summary
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The regulatory environment has an impact on both the birth and growth of the
firms, and hence, also on employment. To meet the goals of the Lisbon strategy the
European Commission has launched an action plan for better regulation with such
means as the withdrawal or modification of pending legislative proposals as well
as measures to simplify the existing legislation. The Commission aims also to improve
the quality of new proposals by systematic use of impact assessment and public
consultation in the development of new policy proposals. Unnecessary regulation
creates costs for the firms, but it has also more a undesirable implication: distortion
of market development. Therefore, better regulation and lighter administrative
burden make the operations of firms more flexible and increase their willingness
and ability to grow.
The Nordic Countries have succeeded in creating a relatively good and stable business
environment. However, the OECD has criticized Finland for insufficient
use of impact assessment in preparations of legislative proposals. For instance, the
development of consistent and flexible methods of analysis and integration of impact
assessment to policy processes require special attention. As a reaction to this
criticism the Finnish Government has conducted projects for enhancing the regulation
environment. As a part of these measures, the Finnish Ministry of Trade and
Industry financed this particular project with the purpose to develop further methods
of competition impact analysis. This report reviews the competition impact
analyses of legislative proposals, the role of impact analysis and also the timing of
the analysis in the legislative work.
Based on international experiences, it is obvious that an impact analysis should be
an integral part of the very early stages of legislative work. If impacts are analyzed
during the preliminary/preparatory legislative work, then it is possible to allow for
these results to affect the final content of the decree. In reality, in legislative work
the disposable time for thorough impact assessment is extremely limited. Therefore,
there is a need for simple and time-sparing methods to evaluate the possible
competitive impacts of legislative proposals. The challenge of the development of
such a methodology can be set as follows: how one can condense the main ideas of
the factors behind market competitiveness from the economic theory and how
changes in these factors affect the welfare of the different stakeholders. By combining
the recent results from competition research, international experiences and examples
of impact assessment, we provide an alternative approach to rise to this challenge.
As known, legislation or more specific regulation has both anticipated and unanticipated
effects on the markets. In many cases the general outcomes of a regulation
depend on the competition in the market, since adjustment of the objects of regula-