Despite the initial delay in Spain in the adoption and development of a better regulation policy compared to other OECD countries, in the last few years significant advances have taken place, as pointed out in the 2010 OECD report “Better Regulation in Europe. Spain”.

In this context, the initiatives promoted by the Autonomous Communities – Spanish subnational levels of government – are also very important, since they have wide powers for the development of their own public regulatory reform policies. In fact, the first Spanish experience of the introduction of regulatory impact assessment in the legal rulemaking process took place in Catalonia, which has been a pioneer in the integration of administrative simplification policies – applied since the early 90s – in addition to its administrative burden reduction strategy.