Implementation of the regulatory impact assessment in the municipal entities of the Russian Federation: issues and prospects

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the issues of legislative regulation and practice of regulatory impact assessment of legal acts carried out in Russian municipal entities following the amendments to Federal Law No. 131 "On General Principles of Organization of Local Self-Government in the Russian Federation". The author analyzes the regulatory framework and mechanisms for its implementation, in particular, on the basis of the criteria for including in the list of municipal entities and methodological documents for regulatory impact assessment on the example of the Sverdlovsk, Ulyanovsk and Leningrad regions. Based on the analysis of the results of the regulatory impact assessment, the recommendations issued and the negative conclusions on the example of municipalities that are regional centers, such as Yekaterinburg, Ulyanovsk, Pskov, Izhevsk and Ulan-Ude, the author determines that regulatory impact assessment has been applied to a sufficiently low number of municipal legal acts with a trace of negative estimates or recommendations. De fine, the author comes to conclusion that the concept of "the degree of concentration of state powers entrusted to municipal entities" is insufficiently defined, and denotes uncertainty and fragmentation of the formulation of evaluation criteria at the level of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, which makes it difficult to enforce regulatory impact assessment and indicates the need to improve the legal methodology. Such situation takes place because the procedure of the evaluation of the regulatory impact starts its implementation on the municipal level, subsequently it can impact significantly the norm setting process.