DUSHANBE, November 14, 2009, Asia-Plus — With support from International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Government of Tajikistan has started work on improving legal acts regulating the procedure of giving permit documents to entrepreneurs, Sarvar Kholiqov, the head of the department for protection of rights of entrepreneurs within the State Committee for Investments and State-owned Property Management (GosKomInvest), told reporters in Dushanbe on November 13.
Basically, Tajikistan’s permit system has not been modernized and it is one of main administrative obstacles on the way of development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the country. The system currently contains obsolete technical requirements of the Soviet time and new ones oriented to market economy have been added to them chaotically over the past fifteen years. The new requirements do not match the old rules of obtaining permits. Moreover, the system is not transparent because a number of legal acts are not available for the majority of entrepreneurs.
According to Kholiqov, to implement the national regulatory reform program, the government and IFC has chosen the Regulatory Guillotine, which is the regulatory reform tool designed to rapidly reduce regulatory costs and prepare countries for more sustainable reforms.
The guillotine strategy was used in various forms by countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the 1990s, and since then has been extensively refined, tested, and developed.
Assessments of the guillotine suggest that the guillotine reform: produces very rapid results (3-18 months) in cutting hundreds or thousands regulations and reducing regulatory costs on businesses (concrete results are summarized in the Results link to the left); improves understanding and management of the regulatory problem by mapping out the full scale of regulatory interventions; increases reform capacities by reducing the political and administrative costs of reform and eroding the capacities of insiders to block change; creates the processes and organizational conditions for continued reform to the regulatory role of the public sector; and stimulates the development of active private partners for reform that will be useful in sustaining momentum.
“On completion of the guillotine strategy, the government will prepare a list of all permits necessary for entrepreneurs,” Kholiqov said.
He reminded that the government set up the commission for improvement of legal acts regulating the procedure of giving permits. The commission is headed by the First Deputy Prime Minister Asadullo Ghulomov.
In the meantime, according to IFC’s survey on Tajikistan’s permit system, some 40 percent of local entrepreneurs face difficulties when applying for permits, a process that is expensive and time-consuming. The system needs reform to make procedures more practical and transparent and ensure that they align with the principles of a market economy. There are more than 500 permits in Tajikistan that are obligatory for the majority of entrepreneurs and obtaining them requires a lot of time and funds, many of them are unnecessary, inefficient and duplicating.
