Exploring Trends and Variations in Agency Scope

Abstract

What are the trends in the design of regulatory agencies' scope of responsibilities? To shed some light on this issue, we explore temporal, sectoral, national and regional variations in the scope of agencies across 16 different policy domains and 48 countries. This exercise represents a first step towards a theoretically driven empirical explanation of the determinants of agency scope. Focusing on the distinction between single- and multi-sector agencies, we demonstrate how agency scope is contingent on national, sectoral and regional characteristics, and provide a preliminary analysis of the characteristics of these variations. Our analysis of the data demonstrates, first, that the scope of agencies has been expanding fast since the late 1990s, often as a result of the extension of regulatory agencification to new sectors, and second, that multi-sectoral agencies are more common in Europe than in Latin America, in economic regulation than in social regulation, and in smaller countries than in bigger ones.

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