Regulatory Quality Index: a process-oriented approach to measure the quality of primary legislation in a country

Well-designed regulations are the indispensable institutional tool for citizens, business and government for the proper function of economy and society. The quality of regulations is a key aspect to ensure improvements in the regulatory policies. The scope of this paper is to present a concept of regulatory quality which reflects the fundamental principles of better regulation and to link this theory with a new methodology on how to construct a composite indicator to measure how good, in terms or process, is the primary legislative output in a country in a given year. The Regulatory Quality Index incldues the key steps of the law - making process and consists of more than 71 individual indicators, over 4 main areas of better regulation: the quality of the regulatory text, the pre-parliamentary lawmaking process, the-parliamentary, the regulatory implementation. The overall score is given by an aggregating formula to a 0 to 100 scale. The aim of the toolkit is to identify the main weaknesses of a regulatory environment and to operate as an indicator for comparative analysis across different countries.