DEJAN ĐOKIĆ, PRESIDENT OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD OF NALED AND DIRECTOR OF ASSECO SEE
100 Recommendations For Better Working Conditions
For the economy to keep turning despite the Covid-19 pandemic, institutions must try harder to find comprehensive rather than partial solutions to create better working conditions in 2021
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or 13 years now, the Grey Book by NALED has been pushing the boundaries in the efforts to establish a predictable and favourable business environment in Serbia. Ensuring efficient procedures is one of the key steps toward the achievement of that aim. However, such victory cannot be achieved by an endless search for secret passages through the administrative system but by defining solutions everyone will be willing to implement. Sometimes we refer to the Grey Book as the “regulatory Bible” the economy and public administration should always go back to. Truly, no such publication (and there are many that deal with issues related to the bureaucratic system) is that comprehensive. The success of the Grey Book lies in the fact that it does not aim to place all the responsibility on public administration expecting the decision-makers to take notice of and do something about the issues because that will never happen.
6 | CorD | NALED | AGENDA 2021
All the descriptions of the procedures to be eliminated or simplified consist of thorough lists of articles of various laws and regulations that complicate bureaucratic procedures. Also, all the unnecessary steps that must be taken and the expenses of such procedures are included, when applicable. The descriptions of identified issues are always accompanied by possible solutions, with clarifications on how the work and regulations of the public administration can be modified. The Grey Book is a list of guidelines for relevant institutions, telling them how to do their work efficiently and which steps to take in order to reach the desired aims to the satisfaction of everyone involved. The choice of the issues that could be included in the Grey Book is always very wide. Therefore, in each edition, we strive to select 100 procedures that would be the most useful in helping improve the circumstances in most sectors of the
economy and enable significant savings in various business procedures. In the previous 12 editions, there were 268 unique recommendations, out of which 72 have been completely solved, and 59 have been partially solved, which means that almost half of the recommendations have found their way to the legislators. I would like to remind you that, in the previous years, the Grey Book has contributed to eliminating excessive administrative procedures, leading to the simplification of the process of obtaining construction permits and real estate rights registration, introduction of electronic taxation for flat rate entrepreneurs, simplified electronic procedures for the registration of seasonal workers, electronic tax certificates and electronic public procurement processes. The list is long, but I would also like to remind you of the already improved procedures (some of which were improved as long as a decade ago). Nowadays, it’s even
