The Government's Interagency Working Group on deregulation (IWG) has reviewed more than a thousand business permits since the beginning of the year. However, the deregulatory reform is not complete. In the future, the IWG will focus, in particular, on reviewing instruments at the business's request, working on deregulation of certain sectors and helping to implement recommendations for the abolition or optimisation of instruments into concrete decisions.

This was announced during the joint online event of the Ministry of Economy and the Centre for Economic Strategy "Deregulation of Business. Interim Results and Plans for the Future" was presented by Yuliia Svyrydenko, First vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, Minister of Economy of Ukraine.

"Since the beginning of 2023, the government's Interagency Working Group on deregulation has begun a planned review of regulatory instruments for business. And now we have reached the end of the compiled list. More than a thousand permits were reviewed. Following the review, almost a quarter of them were recommended to be cancelled, and more than half – to be simplified or digitalised. For example, according to BRDO’s (Better Regulation Delivery Office) estimates, the economic benefit to business from implementing the IWG recommendations will amount to UAH 1.4 billion in the area of regulation of the Ministry of Economy alone. In the agricultural sector – UAH 8.5 billion. In construction – more than UAH 250 million," said Yuliia Svyrydenko.

Oleksiy Sobolev, Deputy Minister of Economy, spoke in more detail about the next steps of the deregulation reform. In particular, the transfer of the state supervision and control system to a risk-based approach.

"We already have a draft law "On the Basic Principles of State Supervision (Control)". This will implement a risk-based approach. In other words, if an entrepreneur has not violated anything, he or she will not be subject to inspections. Also, the next step is to review and optimise the work of inspections," said Oleksiy Sobolev.

"In 2021, more than 200 thousand business inspections were carried out, in 2022 – 11 thousand, and as of the end of October 2023, about 15 thousand. Of course, this year there are more inspections than in 2022, and there are objective reasons for this – the business is working. But despite this, their number has decreased ten times since the moratorium on business inspections was introduced, and nothing has happened. That is, whether it makes sense to return to the classic inspections that were in force until 24 February 2022 is a rhetorical question. There is only one conclusion: the format and methods of inspections need to be changed," added Oleksiy Kucher, Head of the State Regulatory Service of Ukraine.

Oleksiy Dorohan, Executive Director of the BRDO, spoke more about approaches to setting deregulation priorities.

"We need to see annually, on a systematic level, based on analysis and surveys of entrepreneurs, a graph of how much money entrepreneurs spend. Based on this, you can set goals. It will be possible to see the problem areas and assess how effective deregulation is, whether the authorities have come up with any new regulatory instruments, etc. This work is part of the transition from a temporary solution to systemic work," said Oleksiy Dorohan.

In his presentation, Dmytro Horiunov, Senior Economist at the Centre for Economic Strategy, spoke about the stages of deregulation reform in Ukraine and outlined the recommendations of CES (Centre for Economic Strategy) experts on further measures:

"We recommend focusing on the point regulations that have the greatest impact and affect the largest number of entrepreneurs, and in search of such, to survey businesses on which regulation hinders them the most. In addition, the regulation of sectors that directly affect the lives of citizens, such as labour protection and health, as well as sectors that deserve regulation for a reason – monopolies, etc. should be reviewed very carefully," said Dmytro Horiunov.

According to Serhii Vlasenko, Deputy Minister for Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine, the Ministry is currently working on implementing the recommendations of the Interagency Working Group.

"The deregulation of our Ministry began in December 2022 with fruitful cooperation with the State Regulatory Service. After that, during the IWG's work on deregulation, we added to the list of changes. In particular, we are cancelling 61 state regulatory instruments, and sending another 61 for simplification or digitalisation. We have already developed a number of regulations – both draft resolutions and draft laws – that have been sent for approval and are already being processed to ensure that we have concrete results after the IWG's work," said Serhii Vlasenko.

"I am very pleased that the IWG's work plans include a review of the architecture of supervision and control as such. And our assessment is that the work of the Group is super-efficient, which gives us hope that the government will eventually reform both the tax and customs services and look at the financial market, our economic freedom, our financial freedom. This gives us hope, and let's move on to reviewing the areas of supervision and control," summed up the discussion Kyrylo Kryvolap, Executive Director of the Centre for Economic Recovery.

For information.

The Interagency Working Group on the Accelerated Review of State Regulation of Economic Activity was established by the Government on 13 January 2023. The Working Group, co-chaired by Yuliia Svyrydenko, First vice Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Ukraine, includes representatives of the Ministries of Economy, Digital Transformation, Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, Justice, Finance, and Regulatory Services. The IWG's work involves experts from the Better Regulation Delivery Office, the Centre for Economic Recovery, the Centre for Economic Strategy (with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands), EasyBusiness, the USAID "Competitive Economy of Ukraine" Program, the USAID/UKAid "Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services" (TAPAS) project, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.