Effective health-care makes a large and increasing contribution to preventing disease and prolonging life by reducing the population burden of disease. However, only the right kind of health-care delivered in the right way, at the right time, to the right person can improve health. Health-care interventions that are powerful enough to improve population health are also powerful enough to cause harm if incorrectly used. How can public health specialists know whether their interventions are having the desired effect? Clinicians can monitor the impact of their treatments on an individual patient basis, but how do we examine the impact of a new service? This chapter looks at what we mean by quality of health-care and considers some frameworks for its evaluation.

Chapter 5 examines traditional data protection law’s regulatory outcomes. It shows why data rights and rules, while desirable, don’t address the core problems of the contracts model and can’t work well without the liability model. Data rights unintendedly impose administrative burdens on those they protect. Mandatory rules better address power asymmetries and manipulation than defaults. But our procedural rules overregulate while they underprotect: they benefit large players by adversely affecting new players and they allow companies to comply merely by following box-ticking exercises. Against this backdrop, laws legitimize exploitation that can be executed while remaining compliant. A risk-reduction approach based on standards would reduce informational exploitation.

This chapter examines the role of disclosure as a tool for promoting corporate political accountability by reviewing how shareholders reacted to various events in the United States and abroad that either changed the ability of firms to engage in the political process or revealed previously hidden corporate political activity. The conclusions drawn from this summary are mixed, with investors’ reactions contingent on myriad factors, including the form of the political activity engaged in, prior contestation over such activity by shareholders, and other firm-level nonmarket and market dynamics. The chapter concludes by discussing the limits of disclosure as a tool for regulating corporate political activity, as well as public policy more broadly, and advocates for broader, institutional reforms regarding the role of money in politics.

This chapter explores the political role of business in influencing several important federal climate change policy initiatives over the last two decade. These include the Kyoto Protocol (1998), the Climate Stewardship Act (2003), the Climate Security Act (2007), the American Clean Energy and Security Act (2009), the Clean Power Plan (2015), and the Paris Climate Agreement (2015). It examines the increasing patterns of division within the business community and explains why a growing number of companies and investors have voiced support for federal policies to address the risks of global climate change. It also explores why, nonetheless, business opponent of federal regulation have been consistently so successful in preventing the enactment of comprehensive greenhouse reduction policies by the federal government. A key reason is that business opponents of regulation have more to lose than its proponents have to gain.

Chapter 16 establishes the concept of an externality, a situation where a decision carries additional costs or benefits to a party not involved in the decision-making process. The chapter classifies several types of externalities and explores how and why they lead to undesirable outcomes. Then potential solutions to externalities as well as their strengths and weaknesses are discussed: subsidies, taxes, regulation, and the assignment of property rights. The chapter ends with a discussion of cost–benefit analysis and its role in evaluating interventions aimed at combatting externality problems.

FinTech, as we lay out in this book, is best understood as including four major elements: first, global wholesale markets where digitisation means speed, crucial for capitalising on information advantages; second, an explosion of financial technology (FinTech) start-ups particularly since 2008 in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) seeking regulatory lenience that was available to the small but not the large; third, the unprecedented digital financial transformation in retail finance in some countries, particularly China, India, and Kenya; and fourth, the increasing role of large technology companies moving into financial services and digital financial platforms.This long-term process of digitisation and datafication of finance has increasingly combined with the technologies commonly termed ‘ABCD’: Artificial Intelligence (A), Big Data (B), Cloud Computing (C), and Distributed Ledger Technology (D). The latter typically uses blockchains and makes possible the smart contracts that underpin cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies. These technologies have together, on the one hand, prompted the need for digital identification and, on the other hand, triggered the extraordinary growth we have seen: Regulatory Technologies (RegTech) and Supervisory Technologies (SupTech).We include all of these aspects of the revolution through which we are all living in the rubric, FinTech. Its ambit is broad and extends from innovations with disruptive effects on existing intermediaries, such as crowdfunding and crowdlending among many others, through to the entry into financial services of the BigTechs and the existential threats they pose to traditional banks.

The power sector has long been a major obstacle to development in Tanzania. This chapter reviews the reasons that make it so difficult to move from an institutional industry equilibrium that does not bring about desired outcomes in terms of power supply (investment, system expansion, and technical performance) to one that does. The Tanzanian power sector is largely organised as a vertically integrated state-owned monopoly. This model has largely failed across the region for decades. The (difficult) introduction of private power providers and the establishment of an independent regulator have not changed the situation substantially in Tanzania. Political interference has been a constant feature of Tanzania’s power sector. Through pressure on tariffs, this is responsible for its precarious financing. Several high-level corruption scandals involving top officials related to deals made with private providers have turned public opinion against greater reliance on privatisation. As reforming the power sector is hindered by political economy factors, Antonio Estache suggests in his discussion that more reliance should be put on the decentralisation that is being made possible by renewable energy technology.

Since the 2008 GFC, financial regulation has increased dramatically in scope and scale. Post-crisis regulation, plus rapid technological change, has spurred the development of FinTech and RegTech firms and data-driven financial service providers. Financial regulators increasingly seek to balance the traditional objectives of financial stability and consumer protection with promoting growth, innovation, and sustainability. This chapter analyses possible new regulatory approaches, ranging from doing nothing (which spans being permissive to highly restrictive, depending on context), cautious permissiveness (on a case-by-case basis, or through special charters), structured experimentalism (e.g., sandboxes or piloting), and development of specific new regulatory frameworks. We argue for a new balanced, risk-based, proportionate approach that incorporates these rebalanced objectives, and which we term ‘smart regulation’.

RegTech is the use of technology, particularly information technology, in monitoring, compliance and regulatory reporting by industry, and in supervision and enforcement by regulators. For industry, regulators and policymakers, the pace of transformation in digital financial products and systems requires ever greater use of RegTech. In this sense, FinTech demands RegTech. While the principal regulatory objectives of financial stability, prudential safety, consumer protection, and promoting competition remain, their attainment increasingly requires the deployment of sophisticated technology by both reporting entities and regulators. The increasing use of RegTech prompts a paradigm shift necessitating the reconceptualisation of financial regulation.

Distributed ledger technology and the resulting crypto-assets have the potential to transform the financial and payments industry by leveraging features of flexibility, transparency, and rapid scalability. The constant evolution and increasing adoption of this innovation, despite cyclical turbulence, is here to stay, requiring greater stability and control in order to scale to levels unexpected just a few years ago. The opportunity in the payments industry is to bring innovation particularly in cross-border, micro- and conditional payments, to which current offerings struggle to respond due to rules, technologies, and business models that need to be evolved. To allow this innovation to fulfil its full potential, it is crucial to address the challenge related to the current high levels of risk and uncertainty and to define a clear and shared regulatory framework between national and cross-border regulators. A key role will be played by intermediaries, in particular qualified and reliable service providers, capable of meeting the needs and protecting all parties involved, private and public. They have the opportunity to be key players in the change, driving responsible, sustainable, and inclusive adoption of the innovation that DLT and crypto-assets are bringing. Nexi is at the forefront in supporting a secure and easy transition to a better society, aiming at distributed inclusion and safeguarding both the interests of all private and public stakeholders and regulatory clarity.

Crypto-assets, such as cryptocurrencies and tokens, offer a diverse range of payment and investment services. Particularly, tokenisation simplifies products and processes, making negotiation and exchange easier and reducing inefficiencies and costs. However, this disintermediation does not necessarily reduce the role of banks, but rather transforms it, as the increasing complexity of products and services increases the importance of high-value consulting services. Banks can benefit from entering the distributed ledger technology (DLT) ecosystem and can serve as a reliable reference point for investors, consumers, and issuers. However, banks are also exposed to compliance and reputational risks that can only be managed with clear regulation. Regulatory uncertainty, stemming mainly from confusion regarding the legal classification of crypto-assets, hinders the provision of services by banks, and increases risks for consumers and investors. The regulatory framework should be revised in a technology-neutral manner to address these issues and allow for experimentation of innovative solutions, such as the European MiCAR.

Firms are not organized in a monolithic way; their organizations include checks and balances imposed by various sources. Separation of powers may be used, by analogy, in antitrust matters, especially to define organizational remedies or commitments. The search for an analogy between separation of powers and antitrust starts intuitively with the power of an agency or court to break up or unbundle a firm and naturally follows with merger control. A more promising avenue for analogy, though, resides in the fact that firms sometimes possess, de facto, regulatory powers in an industry, raising concerns inter alia on their organization. The reflection on organizational remedies or commitments is premised on the need for additional checks and balances within or on dominant firms whose platforms have a significant impact on society or democracy. It may ultimately lead to the creation of platform assemblies or parliaments. Finally, antitrust may also be raised as an argument or a defense to avoid or reduce sanctions and to get a merger approved.

This chapter examines the regulation of renewable energy in Australia, with a specific focus on wind energy. Renewable energy is rapidly progressing and evolving and represents a crucial component of our approach to greenhouse gas reduction and the transition towards a sustainable, low-carbon society. The chapter examines the broader regulatory frameworks for renewable energy at both the state and federal levels. It reviews how the legal system supports the development of renewable energy as well as a transitioning energy framework. To this extent, the chapter examines the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000 (Cth), the operation of the renewable energy target and the role that the various clean energy bodies have assumed in implementing this framework. It considers some of the economic implications for the energy transition. The nature of wind farming and the regulatory principles and best practices standards for South Australia and Victoria are reviewed.

The imperatives of climate change have accelerated the importance of technologies focused on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been recognised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an essential part of cost-effectively reducing the GHG emissions connected with fossil fuel energy production. Captured carbon is transported, by ship or pipeline, to its storage location deep underground within naturally occurring geological formations. Domestically, CCS has gained increasing support. Currently, the only commercial CCS facility in Australia is the Gorgon Project in Western Australia. More are expected to follow after the implementation of the Climate Change Act 2022 (Cth), entered into between Australia and the United States with the aim of promoting the joint development of low-emissions technology solutions such as CCS via collaboration with industry and the private sector.