Congressional Republicans’ big push to overhaul Obama-era health care laws appears to be dead. So are tax changes next on the agenda?

Business leaders may be left scratching their heads about what those would look like — and how any overhaul would affect their ability to strike deals.

Ask corporate chieftains, bankers and lawyers what is important for mergers, and they will probably say that the key thing is confidence, in the economy and in the regulatory environment. And confidence seems to be in short supply: The pace of deal activity in the first half of the year was moderate at best.

The dollar volume of mergers announced worldwide during that time was up 2 percent compared with the same period last year, at $1.6 trillion, according to Thomson Reuters. But the overall number of deals fell 4 percent, to 22,752.