The world faces an increasingly challenging global economic outlook. As governments tackle interconnected policy challenges, they also find themselves overseeing growingly complex bodies of regulation. In a global and fast evolving environment, regulations tend to lag behind market evolution, overlap and multiply. While regulations have been developed to support positive societal and economic outcomes, fragmentation, inconsistency or poor implementation can undermine and hinder these very goals, making policy priorities more difficult to achieve and hindering productivity growth. These negative effects are magnified in a rapidly evolving technological environment and a globalised world where the lack of cross-border harmonisation bears high costs.
In this context, some governments across the world are starting to put forward ambitious regulatory burden and simplification initiatives. Their objectives span from spurring economic growth and competitiveness to regaining public trust in effective government action, and they focus on decisively different approaches that range from reducing procedural burdens (administrative simplification) to removing regulations and their objectives altogether (deregulation). In general, these initiatives build on years or decades of existing programmes designed to cut red tape – initiatives that have not been sufficient to avoid creeping regulatory complexity.
The OECD high-level Symposium “Simplifying for Success” provides a pivotal platform to explore current regulatory burden reduction and simplification initiatives and define the path to tangible outcomes for business. Global leaders from government, business, trade and consumer protection organisations exchanged on what has been learnt from past efforts, what is different today, and how governments can more effectively reduce regulatory complexity and costs while safeguarding the public interest.
The Symposium forms part of the OECD Simplifying for Success (S4S) initiative, that aims to support renewed government efforts to deliver simple, smart and streamlined regulations to help unlock prosperity. This objective will be supported by providing a forum for exchange and peer learning on current initiatives and to take stock of past efforts, developing clarity about concepts and tools to mitigate misperceptions, and proposing forward-looking methodologies for regulatory burden reduction and simplification.
