EU regulatory madness

Which bureaucratic monsters are crushing the economy

Too many regulations paralyze companies and cost an enormous amount of money.

(Bild: stock.adobe.com)

60,000 civil servants work in the 76 EU institutions. To ensure that they have enough to do, they write more than 2,000 pieces of legislation every year. This year, 1850 new regulations have already come from Brussels. Agenda Austria criticizes the fact that domestic companies are suffering more and more under the burden of bureaucracy.

"Bureaucracies never shrink by themselves, they tend to grow," says economist Jan Kluge from Agenda Austria. Just as entrepreneurs maximize their profits, bureaucrats maximize their budgets and thus their importance for the state. The multitude of regulations already costs a lot of money. Individual entrepreneurs spend around 250 hours a year on bureaucracy. In trade and crafts, companies state that they have to sacrifice seven percent of their personnel capacity for bureaucracy.