As part of the Moldovan government’s endeavor to accelerate the transition to a market-led economy, JC&A designed the centerpiece of Moldova’s recent regulatory reforms: initiation of radical regulatory reform by adoption on 16 December 2004 of a Law on Optimization of the Normative Framework for the Regulation of Business Activity. This “Guillotine law” became effective on 6 February 2005. The law laid out a guillotine approach to review and streamline, over six months, what was initially anticipated to be a total of 300-500 regulations affecting business activity, which turned out to be more than 1,200. This reform was intended to assist the government in rapidly simplifying the regulatory environment for businesses.
On 10 August 2005, the Council of Ministers adopted the Governmental Decision on the Registry of Official Acts, so the guillotine formally “fell.”
The Decision specified that: 426 formal acts were included in the new electronic Registry; 285 legal acts (or 35 %) were to be amended; 99 legal acts (or 12 % of those relevant to businesses) were to be discarded. Many were illegal and had not been published or authorized by higher-level laws.
In August 2006, the Government prepared a new comprehensive regulatory reform law that creates a permanent regulatory review in updating mechanisms and establishes a secure electronic regulatory for business regulations. JC&A first recommended the guillotine under a World Bank project as part of a more extensive diagnostic of regulatory practices in Moldova. We presented the concept to the Minister of Economy. Once it was adopted, we were the chief technical advisor on the design and implementation of the guillotine, working with the BizPro project run by DAI under USAID financing over the entire project cycle. The Moldova guillotine was designed around the standard JC&A approach, modified to fit the three-level institutional structure of the Moldovan reform.
Moldova, Moldovan Ministry of Finance with World Bank funding, 2004-2005
