The purpose of this Activity is to improve business transparency and integrity practices in targeted municipalities. This will be done through streamlining local regulations and regulatory practices and by strengthening private sector regulatory compliance and advocacy capabilities for better policies in high-impact municipalities.
This will be accomplished through two primary components:
- Modernization of local regulatory, permitting, and inspection processes: advancing the modernization and streamlining of the local regulatory framework and associated procedures are mostly digital, including effective compliance and appeal systems, and sustainably reduce undue administrative discretion; and
- Strengthening of private sector regulatory compliance and advocacy capabilities: providing technical assistance and accompaniment to MSMEs to allow them to better deal with the regulatory environment and to provide them with the necessary tools to influence and be part of local regulatory processes and practices.
JC&A services are framed within the first component of the project (see above) and cover the following three areas:
- Run a VECS certification process with municipal officials of target municipalities. VECS is CONAMER’s (National Commission on Regulatory Improvement) simplified one-stop building permit model. It has been highly successful in simplifying permitting for commercial buildings under 10,000 square meters. However, it is a complex program that requires long implementation periods and intense work by municipalities. Hence, CONAMER has only been able to implement between 5 and 8 a year. The Activity will double that capacity by training municipal officials, launching the certification process and advising them on how to implement VECS in the target municipalities.
- Simplify and reengineer 10-15 high impact municipal regulations. The highest regulatory compliance burden is concentrated among a handful of high-impact regulations that are complex, lack transparency and have a high degree of administrative discretion. JC&A will select 10-15 of these regulatory requirements in close consultation with CONAMER, the municipalities and the private sector, and radically simplify and reengineer them in the target municipalities. Depending on municipality uptake, JC&A may reengineer all 10-15 regulations in each of the municipalities.
Assess the current municipal inspection system in 10-15 municipalities and implement a new inspection system for each municipality. The inspections system is one of the most problematic aspects of municipal governance and it has been used as a tool for extortionary tactics on businesses. This is one of the reasons CONAMER established the new registries of inspections and inspectors. However, a revamping of the way inspections are conceived, planned, and executed is necessary to improve their transparency, predictability, and effectiveness. JC&A will develop a new inspections model, learning from international best practices, and pilot it in target municipalities to then be adopted.
Funded by USAID through Centro de Estudios Económicos del Sector Privado (CEESP) from the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE), 2021-2024.
