INESS: Slovakia Has Most Red Tape among V4 Countries, Ukraine and Georgia

Bratislava, February 24 (TASR) - Slovakia is at the top of the Bureaucracy Index 2024, which compares the Visegrad Four (V4) countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), Georgia and Ukraine, TASR learnt on Monday from the Economic and Social Analysis Institute (INESS), which compiled the ranking in cooperation with the Czech Liberal Studies Institute, the Georgian New Economic School Georgia, the Hungarian Free Market Foundation, the Polish Civic Development Forum and the Ukrainian Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting. Slovakia topped the overall ranking of bureaucracy, followed by Hungary and Georgia. On the contrary, Poland and Ukraine are the most helpful to entrepreneurs. The Bureaucracy Index aims to provide a detailed list and quantification of the bureaucratic burden faced by SMEs. The overall results are calculated as the average cumulative time required to start and operate a small hotel and industrial enterprise in each country. Setting up a model industrial operation was the easiest in terms of time in Poland in 2024, with only 19 hours of bureaucracy. On the contrary, it was the most time-consuming in Ukraine, where all tasks required 64 hours. However, the bureaucracy there is also complicated by the state of war. Slovakia ranked second worst in the bureaucratic difficulty of starting a business with 46 hours of red tape. Entrepreneurs in Georgia also needed over 40 hours. In the Czech Republic it was 39 hours and in Hungary 37 hours. The 'business operation' category measures the annual number of hours of administrative work of already established small firms. Slovakia was an undesirable leader in the ranking of bureaucratic costs, with 272 hours for the operation of small industrial production (34 working days). Slovakia was followed by Hungary. Conversely, Ukraine and Poland had the lowest bureaucratic burden among the six participating countries (192 and 148 hours respectively). am/mcs