The President of the Croatian Employers’ Association (HUP), Gordana Deranja, stated on Friday that politics bears the greatest responsibility for the failure to implement reforms and that the current government has the opportunity to carry out what its predecessors have missed.
Deranja, at the conference “Better Regulations for Better Business” organized by the Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Crafts, said that employers have been warning for years about the problems faced by entrepreneurs – high taxes, high non-tax levies, legal uncertainty, excessive bureaucratization, constant changes in laws, and ineffective public administration.
Entrepreneurs and employers in Croatia spend most of their time working for the state, not for themselves and their employees, said Deranja, emphasizing that their dissatisfaction is not new.
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According to Dalić, the Ministry of Economy has established a system and methodology for measuring regulatory costs with the aim of systematically reducing them. It has been determined that there are 570 different regulations that affect economic entities, which contain 1,800 different administrative obligations for the economy.
“While governments change, all these bad things remain the same, and the consequences of ignoring our warnings are becoming increasingly severe,” she said.
She added that no one should be satisfied with the fact that we are economically at the bottom of EU countries, just as we should not be surprised by the European Commission’s statement that we are in that position because we do not implement reforms.
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“Although the blame for the failure to implement reforms is not solely on politics, politics still bears the greatest responsibility. The current government bears the least responsibility, while much more falls on all those, both left and right, before it who completed their mandates without changing almost anything, even during the greatest crisis when everyone else was doing it except us,” emphasized Deranja.
She stated that the current government has the chance to start what its predecessors did not – to change things and ways of working.
“The reform package that will reduce administrative burdens is a good start, for which it is crucial to work even more intensively on removing all those regulations and levies that unnecessarily burden business operations. We hope that the government will succeed in its announcement to dedicate this year, as well as others, to reforms, and employers will support it in these efforts,” Deranja stated.
Administrative Relief for the Economy
Presenting measures for administrative relief for the economy, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy Martina Dalić emphasized that the government accepted the action plan for administrative relief for the economy in 2018 on Thursday, which contains 98 measures that will reduce entrepreneurs’ costs by 625.9 million kuna.
According to Dalić, the Ministry of Economy has established a system and methodology for measuring regulatory costs with the aim of systematically reducing them. It has been determined that there are 570 different regulations that affect economic entities, which contain 1,800 different administrative obligations for the economy.
During the past year, an analysis of 200 regulations was conducted, which identified the existence of 600 different obligations, for which it was calculated and estimated that they create a regulatory cost for the economy of about 5.1 billion kuna, she said.
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Dalić reiterated that the government’s action plan is the second in a series, as the implementation of the first, which the government adopted at the beginning of last year, is being completed, and its full implementation is expected in a few months.
With the adoption of the new plan, the reduction of bureaucratic costs continues, Dalić stated.
The plan includes measures that specifically abolish the obligation to maintain a number of records and registers under the jurisdiction of the tax and customs administration, which brings simpler and cheaper business operations for more than 90,000 business entities.
The number of approvals in the tourism sector is also being reduced, various tests for employees in tourism are being abolished, and the abolition of the payment of tourism membership fees for the IT sector and other activities not closely related to tourism is planned, said the Deputy Prime Minister.
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A number of solutions, permits, and approvals that have so far been necessary to obtain in phytosanitary protection, aquaculture, and freshwater fisheries are also being abolished, and the abolition of fees for the general public function of forests for all entrepreneurs with income below three million kuna is already in the process of adoption.
It is also proposed to reduce a significant number of consents and confirmations required for performing geodetic activities. Another group of cost reductions brought by the action plan relates to digitalization, i.e., expanding electronic communication in delivering various reports, forms, and requests to state administration bodies.
