Red tape is burdensome to companies, inhibits entrepreneurship, and reduces competitiveness. This book examines country strategies and tools for reducing red tape and the institutional frameworks set up to reduce red tape, and finds what the trends ...
“Too much red tape” is a common complaint from businesses and citizens in OECD countries. This report analyses proven approaches commonly adopted by governments to reduce and streamline administrative procedures like one-stop shops (physical and ...
Businesses’ Views on Red Tape provides the first opportunity to systematically compare data across 11 OECD countries. The data show how small and medium-sized enterprises perceive national administrative and regulatory costs. Regulations and ...
Businesses’ Views on Red Tape provides the first opportunity to systematically compare data across 11 OECD countries. The data show how small and medium-sized enterprises perceive national administrative and regulatory costs. Regulations and government formalities, so-called "red tape", are important tools used by governments to carry out public policies in many policy areas, including safety, health, and environmental protection. However, if they are poorly designed or applied, inefficient, or outdated, they can impede innovation, entry, investment, and create unnecessary barriers to trade, investment, and economic efficiency. The result of poor regulation and formalities is that national economies become less able to grow, compete, adjust, and create jobs. Based on a survey of almost 8 000 businesses, this report assesses the quality, application and burdens of employment, environment and tax regulations and formalities. The results are dramatic: for example, red tape accounts for 4% of the annual turnover of companies, while the hardest hit are the smallest companies, and these costs are growing in most countries.
Death, taxes, and red tape. The inevitable trio no one can escape. That wry sense of reality colors Herbert Kaufman's classic study of red tape, the bureaucratic phenomenon that all of us have encountered in some form—from the confounding tax form filled out annually to the maddeningly time-consuming wait at the driver's license bureau. The complaints about red tape, Kaufman concedes, are legion. It's messy, it takes too long, it lacks local knowledge, it is out of date, it makes insane demands, it increases costs, it slows progress. It is, in short, a burden and many times there is no measurable positive outcome. Kaufman takes us on an unblinking tour of the dismal landscape of red tape. But he also shows us another side of red tape, one we often forget. Red tape is how government protects us from tainted food, shoddy products, and unfair labor practices. It guarantees a social safety net for the elderly, the disabled, children, veterans, and victims of natural disasters. One person's red tape is another person's protection. This reissue is a Brookings Classic, a series of republished books for readers to revisit or discover, notable works by the Brookings Institution Press.
Cutting red tape has become a priority in OECD countries. This pilot study measures and compares administrative burdens in the transport sector across eleven member countries: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Turkey.
For years, America has been plagued by slow economic growth and increasing inequality. In The Captured Economy, Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles identify a common factor behind these twin ills: breakdowns in democratic governance that allow wealthy special interests to capture the policymaking process for their own benefit. They document the proliferation of regressive regulations that redistribute wealth and income up the economic scale while stifling entrepreneurship and innovation. They also detail the most important cases of regulatory barriers that have worked to shield the powerful from the rigors of competition, thereby inflating their incomes: subsidies for the financial sector's excessive risk taking, overprotection of copyrights and patents, favoritism toward incumbent businesses through occupational licensing schemes, and the NIMBY-led escalation of land use controls that drive up rents for everyone else. An original and counterintuitive interpretation of the forces driving inequality and stagnation, The Captured Economy will be necessary reading for anyone concerned about America's mounting economic problems and how to improve the social tensions they are sparking.
This work includes a brief history of skyscrapers as well as chapters on elevators and communications, facades and facing, mechanical and electrical systems, forces of nature, and much more.
This report encourages governments to “think big” about the relevance of regulatory policy and assesses the recent efforts of OECD countries to develop and deepen regulatory policy and governance.