Opinion
Complaints about German business bureaucracy have rarely been as loud as they are today. But is the lament about the excessive bureaucracy actually true?
The employer associations that hide behind the New Social Market Economy Initiative are drumming up a fight against the “Bureaucratic Republic of Germany”. And in order to put a particularly rough wedge on the rough block of officialdom, they also decorate their campaign in the media with a kind of GDR flag. This probably means: We are on the way back to a kind of Honecker state. And in fact, almost every entrepreneur knows examples of nonsensical government regulations in their industry.
But are we really that particularly burdened with bureaucracy? If you look closely, the difficulties begin with the simple question of how to define bureaucracy. First of all, the word that has become a negative battle term is historically about something very positive: the rule of the administration according to clear rules and clear areas of responsibility on the basis of regulations and laws. So the exact opposite of arbitrary rule, as prevails in dictatorships and absolutist monarchies. What some people consider to be good bureaucracy, others see as bad bureaucracy. Z: Its supporters want to promote global respect for human rights, while its opponents feel that their economic activities are being restricted.
When making international comparisons, economists don’t like to talk about bureaucracy, but rather talk about the efficiency of government actions – and they see administration as just one aspect. In the corresponding global rankings, Germany is found far behind the best countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands or Singapore. But usually still ahead of the USA, England or France. So we could definitely do a lot better and should strive for it, but we don’t have to go into sackcloth and ashes.
Sometimes bureaucracy serves one’s own interests
Interestingly, the critics of the alleged “Bureaucratic Republic of Germany” like to point to the example of a country where the economy is supposedly particularly fast and unbureaucratic: the People’s Republic of China. But in the ranking of “The Global Economy” the communist regime is ranked 56th, the Federal Republic is ranked 25th. The communist leadership can certainly decide everything with the stroke of a pen and do foreign investors great favors in the process. But that has nothing to do with good administration – on the contrary. .
From the perspective of many German entrepreneurs, it is always others who are responsible for more bureaucracy. Business likes to create its own precise bureaucratic rules if it benefits its own interests. For example, the German steel industry is currently working with politicians on a new set of rules to protect “green” German steel from “dirty” foreign steel in the future. Because they want to enforce special regulations for special varieties and because there should of course be transition periods if they benefit German manufacturers, one can already prophesy: The industry is giving birth to a new bureaucratic monster. And you can still complain later about the terrible bureaucracy in Germany – after all, the steel industry is one of the co-financers of the current campaign.
Source: Stern
