Regulations should further their primary mission. Yet, many regulations designed to reduce health, safety and environmental risks end up increasing the risk of injury and death. A lack of cost-benefit analysis is often blamed for the unintended consequences resulting in an increase in these risks. There are several reasons why regulations can lead to increased risks.
Research has shown a link between a society’s wealth and longevity. To the degree that costly regulations reduce national income, they result in lives lost:
The authors limited their examination to only the 24 regulations where 90 percent of benefits were mortality related. Of the regulations examined, those with the largest induced mortality were disproportionately those of the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA rules that raised mortality risk were those designed to reduce exposure to carcinogens in the environment.
Source: Robert W. Hahn, Randall W. Lutter and W. Kip Viscusi, Do Federal Regulations Reduce Mortality?, AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, November 2000.
For text http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/books/hlv.pdf
For more on Improving the Regulatory Process http://www.ncpa.org/pd/regulat/reg-8.html
