I appreciate a contrarian take, but this one from FT on European overregulation (the take — it’s not any worse than America) is just plain wrong. For example:
It’s not just Europe. The most recent “revolt” is explicitly premised on the claim that Europe has been falling behind US growth because it is more heavily regulated. But stop and think for a second: aren’t Americans complaining just as much about red tape? The US, too, is a master of throwing bureaucratic spanners in the wheels […]
In fact, those who measure such things find that the EU has more streamlined regulation than the US. Every five years, the OECD collects data on how competition-friendly its member states’ regulation is. Below is the 2023 vintage, for both the overall indicator and the sub-indicator “Administrative and regulatory burden”.
Pulling a lumbering bureaucracy’s stats sheet to show you’re not bureaucratic is a beautifully European thing to do. Never mind that the chart it shows are each individual country’s rules and regulations. The EU by itself has yet another set or rules, cast as a pall over any hope you may have that doing business in a member country will be smooth painless.