There is plenty of space, people and incentives for investment at different meridians but there is even more cautiousness in every potential investor. For each new job the investor must get professional and transparent treatment and often a wide range of benefits. Legal certainty, predictability, swiftness of response and action, availability of information and compliance with the achieved agreement are sacred for doing business.
With aggravated Serbian economy, it would be justifiable to think that these business rules are recognized here as well. Unfortunately, experience from practice indicates otherwise. During addressing to the public administration, businessmen often crawl through the bureaucratic labyrinth collecting the documents, while often receiving partial, contradictory or incorrect information. Walking from one to another "competent" authority, time and money, but also confidence in the system functioning are vanishing. The reason for such situation are complex and unclear regulations and administrative procedures, outdated, slow, complicated and non-functional mode of the public administration work, often accompanied by inadequate attitude and performance of public employees.
Could we provide to citizens, entrepreneurs, domestic and foreign companies quality solutions, efficient decision-making process, simple and harmonized rules, which are not time-consuming and which would improve business environment and stimulate economic development?
Regulatory reform is the key to solving this problem. It includes a set of measures, in response to the unsatisfactory state of the legal framework and its implementation. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - OECD , regulatory reform refers to changes that improve regulation, i.e. enhance its effects, costs and benefits ratio, legal quality of regulations and related administrative procedures.
OPTIMUS has extensive experience in the field of regulatory reform based on implementation of projects at the local level, support to national reforms in the area of planning and construction in Serbia, as well as on establishment of vertical links between the national and local authorities in improving laws and bylaws. Our concentrated knowledge stems also from long experience of our experts in implementation of regulatory reform projects, conducted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC-WBG) in over 35 locations in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, and beyond.
Our support includes:
- Simplifying administrative procedures and improving regulations, with detailed identification of the current situation, analysis of the legal and institutional framework and preparation of recommendations and solutions for the simplification and improvement;
- Economic analysis – calculation of costs of businesses and citizens, while exercising their legally prescribed rights and obligations at the public administration;
- Preparing draft regulations;
- Capacity building of public administration (state and local level);
- Developing software solutions for legally secure, publicly available electronic Registry of administrative procedures and regulations;
- Introducing principles of regulatory impact assessment (RIA) in the process of adopting regulations at the local level;
- Executing consultations with businesses and civil sector;
- Preparing recommendations for the improvement of national laws and bylaws, based on identified problems in their implementation at the local level;
- Establishing One-Stop-Shop for obtaining permits, through electronic networking of relevant actors;
- Improving the institutional mechanism for continuous creating of good regulation;
- Executing other activities in order to improve business environment and simplify administration.
The effects of regulatory reform, among other things, include:
- Reduction of administrative barriers;
- Increased economic efficiency through private sector cost savings;
- Establishment of a sustainable system of continuous making of quality laws and bylaws;
- More efficient, simpler and less costly bureaucratic system;
- Improved transparency of legislation for reducing the possibility of corruption.
Please find more about our results on the web pages of projects: "Improving Environment for Businesses at Local Level through Regulatory Reform", "Improving business environment to increase investment in tourism infrastructure" and "Trainings on One-Stop-Shop in the process of electronic issuance of construction permits".
