How to identify “gold-plating”: challenges and solutions

Abstract

Public intervention must find the balance between public policy objectives and the secondary impacts on citizens and businesses by conditioning their activity and decision-making capacity, as well as by creating burdens. Within the European legislative process, this dichotomy is further reinforced by the complexity of the regulatory chain, which includes the European Institutions and the Member States, by the application of the subsidiarity principle and by promotion the European economy competitiveness and the sustainability the Single Market.

It is in this framework that we propose to discuss the topic of gold-plating, the reasons for its existence and the practical difficulties of its identification. We also look at this type of dynamic from the perspective of promoting transparency in the European legislative process.