What’s the Cost of e-Access to Legal Information? A composite indicator

There is a shared belief that e-government policies can help turning regulatory compliance less costly, thus improving the regulatory environment that surrounds economic growth. While there is a growing volume of literature assessing the economic, political, ans social benefits of a good regulatory environment, the effects of online access to legal information on both governance and the business environment have been so far unexplored. On one hand, the Doing Business indicators are produced under the assumption of full availability of information on the procedures needed to set up a business. On the other, despite the cost of regulatory information discovery looms large for businesses, institutional economics literature has not yet provided a model for these specific costs of information discovery.
Therefore, the design and implementation of measures for online access to legal and regulatory information proves much needed to gain insights into the costs of information discovery and their effects on the regulatory environment for policy reform that are simply unavailable to us using current methods.
This paper makes two main contributions. First, it provides a model for the costs of discovery of legal information and an empirical test of the relationship between governmental online presence and legal publication, on one hand, and the quality of the regulatory environment, on the other. Second, it shows that current measures of access to legal information are in need of improvement and presents a composite indicator to measure the costs of online access to legal information.