red tape

So far, the COVID-19 pandemic has had little effect on the German housing market. It has left barely a mark on real estate prices or rentals. But the pandemic is not over yet, and even if it was: the past months have triggered some developments that will transform our working world and are likely to have a considerable impact on the housing market in the long term.

Bureaucracy is still a burden for both entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens. One of the reasons why the political “fight” has not achieved remarkable success in fighting the red tape, is a missing connection between politics and the everyday life of entrepreneurs.

The last time the Czech government conducted an analysis of how high and costly the bureaucratic burden was in the Czech Republic, the result was that the state required the business to meet almost 1,500 different information obligations.

Bureaucracy Index was introduced in Slovakia in 2016 by Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) to emphasize the amount of red tape a small entrepreneur has to overcome on a daily basis. It is based on a straightforward methodology, using an analysis of a model company.

INESS members took to the streets with a physical version of the annual bureaucracy load of a new company (652 pages of forms) and polled pedestrians about their view on red tape, giving red apples to the pessimists and green ones to the more positive oriented folks.

Let’s be honest. Governments remember deregulation in their talks with businesses or during election campaigns. But they do not pay nearly as much attention to deregulation as they do to expanding regulatory obligations, increasing taxes, or telling people how to behave.

The pressure on publications at the expense of didactics, grants orientation, unmotivated students, the level of professors’ skills and, above all, red tape - these are the weaknesses of the system of higher education, which in many cases lower the level of teaching.