The Agency Model: The Growth of Regulation and Regulatory Institutions in the European Union*

rationale for some form of government intervention has seldom been challenged in the increasingly important area of social regulation – environment, health, safety, consumer protection. The issue here is not, strictly speaking, deregulation but rather how to achieve certain regulatory objectives by less burdensome methods. Thus, the replacement of environmental standards by pollution taxes does not do away with environmental regulation but only introduces different, and presumably more effective, policy instruments.