On October 8, ISET hosted Andreja Marusic, the World Bank’s Global Lead for Business Environment. Ms. Marusic delivered a presentation “Doing Business and Beyond”. The presentation covered a general overview and current international practices in business environment reforms as well as the important systemic issues of moving from ad-hoc business environment reforms (such as the Doing Business indicators centric reforms) to a more sustainable approach, including a focus on predictability, transparency, public consultation, and Regulatory Impact Assessment.

At the begging of her presentation, Andreja Marusic listed “traditional” business environment reform ideas and pointed out some new areas to focus on like risk-based regulations and implementation gap, sectorial and sub-national regulatory reforms, etc. She also showed the main changes in Doing Business Report and explained that the new system compares countries to the best practice (New Zealand).

According to Ms. Marusic, the main reason for these changes was the critique against the report that it gives a very narrow picture. Thus, the changes are made in order to expand the focus in data sets to also broach the quality of services and recent good practices in the areas covered. However, she also pointed out the disadvantage of these changes such as the report losing its simplicity.

The next part of the presentation was dedicated to the impacts of regulatory practices and consequently the importance of good regulatory practices. Ms. Marusic explained that poor quality consultation results in bad regulation, which leads to a need to further review and reform. She pointed out the main mistakes (Trying to achieve consensus, “ex-post” consultation, and consulting only with interest groups) and showed International best practices: EU minimum consultation standards. After the presentation World Bank’s Global Lead for Business Environment discussed the priority areas of business environment reforms for Georgia and how can a systemic consultation mechanism become part of the policymaking and regulatory process of our country.