ECTRI Transport Economics and Policy Webinar #11

Title: “Ex ante or ex post – When should the consequences of EU legislation be evaluated? A Nordic comparison.”

Speaker: Johanna Jussila Hammes from VTI

Bio: Johanna Jussila Hammes has a PhD in Economics from the University of Gothenburg. She works as a senior researcher at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute. Her research interests include the analysis of the use of regulatory impact assessments (RIA), or the lack thereof, and reasons for these deficiencies, along with the implementation of RIA and policy analyses in practice.

Abstract: National regulatory impact assessments (RIA) are, as a rule, not made during the EU-legislative process in Denmark and Sweden. At the same time, a willingness to be the “best in the class” has led to over-implementation of EU directives in these countries. In order to reduce this over-implementation, in 2019, Denmark constituted a Regelforum that makes proposals to reduce the over-implementation. A similar Implementation Council has been discussed in Sweden. A third Nordic EU-member, Finland, proposed an enhanced process to be used ahead of new EU legislation already in 2015. While the process still is not perfect, the Finnish participation in the preparation process of EU-legislation starts much earlier than that in Sweden, and includes the use of RIA in several stages. In order to be able to effectively forward national interests, member states must be well prepared. A national RIA would contribute towards this aim. I will present a model of how the EU-legislative process works, and how member states in a better way could contribute to the formation of this legislation from the beginning, based on the Finnish example and also discussing its implementation in Sweden (and to a lesser extent in Denmark).

Seminars are open to the ECTRI Members.
Please contact the Secretariat if you are interested to join: www.ectri.org/contact/