EU Environmental Policy and its Effect on U.S. Chemical Regulation

Abstract: The purpose of this paper was to assess how the EU chemical regulation, REACH, affected the reform of the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act. It borrows from theories of policy diffusion and of the EU as a regulatory power, which were used to theorize two causal mechanisms potentially leading to convergence between the European and American chemical regulations, tested using a method of process-tracing. The first is a theory based on competition and market power, explaining that firms exporting to the EU necessarily had to adapt to REACH, provoking rent-seeking at home. The second is based on learning, and argues that American lawmakers took lessons from the EU experience with REACH. Both models were found to be faulty. The first undervalued the effect of a large domestic market, and overvalued the effect of submitting to foreign regulations. The second model made the faulty assumption that, under certain circumstances, learning from REACH would necessarily lead to doing as REACH. Furthermore, the TSCA reform ended up diverging from REACH in key areas. More nuanced models can give a better understanding of both how policy converges and of the EU’s regulatory influence.