Government regulation is part of two larger areas of study, one encompassing all state policy making and administration, whether regulatory or not, the other encompassing all regulatory and deregulatory activity, whether by the state or by some other institution. Viewed either way, the subject remains an interdisciplinary growth industry, with contributions made by political scientists, economists, legal scholars, historians, and sociologists. Scholarly emphasis in the 1990s on economic globalization and its consequences has added to an already rich literature on government regulation, deregulation, and re-regulation. Now attention is focused on the supranational as well as the national level. Cross-national, comparative studies of government regulation complement a large literature focused on the United States.

What Is Government Regulation?

There is no uniformly agreed-upon concept of regulation that separates it from other kinds of government activity. Mitnick (1980, pp. 3–19) offers a good overview of concepts of regulation. On the...