Regulatory Independence in the Philippines’ Electric Power Industry: Reality or Fallacy?

In a democratic country like the Philippines, regulatory independence is a crucial concern. The independent regulatory agency must be free from any interference that serves vested interest particularly coming from politicians, donors, and stakeholders in order to acquire regulatory legitimacy or public acceptance and, more importantly, to promote and protect the interest of the publics. This paper tries to measure the level of regulatory independence in the Philippines’ electric power industry as exercised by the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) with the aim of establishing how far it has gone and still has to go. The ERC’s current practices in exercising its regulatory independence vis-à-vis the practices in other jurisdictions were put side by side in this paper through literature review. Having undertaken such work proves that the circumstances in the Philippines, though a developing country, are not unique and, in fact, very similar to the occurrences in some developed countries, except for the level or degree of regulatory independence. The exercise of regulatory independence, however, will always have challenges given the political and administrative systems and cultures that inherently exist. These challenges, nonetheless, though impedes the exercise of regulatory independence in one way or another can also be used to the advantage of the regulatory agency.