Distributional Consequences of Transnational Private Regulation: Institutional Complementarity as a Structural Source of Power in Global Product and Financial Markets

Abstract

Transnational regulations, often established by private bodies, play a large and important role in the international political economy. This paper makes two contributions to the literature on transnational regulation. First, governments and international organization often legitimate the delegation of regulatory authority to transnational private bodies with efficiency gains. It is rare, however, that the alleged gains are empirically examined, which requires a comparative analysis vis-a-vis other regulatory regimes. I contrast rule-making for manufactured goods and financial reporting, where a single transnational private body is the clear focal point for rule-making at the international level, with purely domestic regulatory regimes and the prior attempts to establish international product and financial standards through negotiations between governments or public regulators. I show that the shift to transnational (private) regulation indeed brought real, substantial gains in the effectiveness and efficiency of rule-making. Second, I scrutinize the distributional consequences of transnational private regulation, which I submit are closely related to the efficiency gains. Here, the existing literature focuses on the distribution of the financial costs and benefits of specific rules among those who are the targets of such rules, given a particular regulatory regime. Institutional complementarity theory provides a powerful analytical framework for examining such distributional effects. In this paper, I push the framework further to examine the distributional consequences of the shift to transnational private regulation. I argue that this shift has persistent structural consequences for the relative power of a broad range of stakeholders (both within and across countries) and thus for their regulatory capabilities.