Regulation is the enemy of economic growth

Ukraine inherited and uncritically adopted from the Soviet Union a significant share of regulatory instruments that are in force today. And another part was blindly copied from the EU and the USA. As a result, an impenetrable thicket of laws, codes, resolutions, orders, and regulatory acts was formed, which are adopted, monitored, and controlled by hundreds of structures and organizations at the national and local levels.
 
As a result, we have that the regulatory burden in Ukraine is 15-17% of GDP. If we take the pre-war size of the economy (2021, $200 billion), then it is approximately $30-34 billion. This is huge money, in 2022 Ukraine spent almost the same amount on defense.
 
Such figures of the regulatory burden are derived based on the methodology of the American Competitive Enterprise Institute. For comparison: in the USA, the regulatory burden is 11-13% of GDP, in the more regulated EU, it is 13-15%.
 
The main areas in Ukraine that generate regulatory costs are military goods and services, security, production of consumer goods/services, construction, housing (registration, registration), labor market, migration, ecology, money and finance, taxes, accounting, statistics and accounting, customs, energy, communal services, education, health care and others. Each sphere is divided into dozens of positions, each of which involves regulatory instruments and dozens of regulatory bodies that control all this.
 
But the main question, which the latter are unable to answer, is “Do you regulate for what?”. To accelerate economic growth? — prove with numbers and facts. To make it safer? – prove it. To win the battle for investment? – prove it. The list of questions about efficiency, which state bodies in Ukraine do not answer, can be continued.
 
I propose to start a regulatory revolution in diagnostics and auditing. If within half a year the body/organization cannot prove (scientific methodology, figures, facts) the need to introduce a regulatory instrument, it is canceled. This is how we will carry out effective, fast and high-quality debureaucratization and deregulation.