Suchergebnisse

Résumé La suppression des fardeaux administratifs ou « l'allègement de la bureaucratie » devient une priorité politique dans la plupart des pays développés. Le principal problème rencontré par les entreprises et les particuliers est que depuis deux décennies, la réglementation à laquelle ils doivent faire face devient de plus en plus complexe, et les procédures connexes entrainent un fardeau financier pour les entreprises et les individus. Dans le présent article, nous présentons les résultats de la première évaluation exhaustive de la qualité des institutions publiques dans le domaine de la réglementation fiscale, environnementale et de l'emploi en Slovénie. Les chefs d'entreprise ont été invités à évaluer la qualité des institutions et de la réglementation dans ces trois domaines et leurs conséquences sur leurs activités. La recherche indique que les institutions de protection de l'environnement ont obtenu les moins bons résultats, tandis que la réglementation dans ce domaine a elle aussi obtenu de mauvais résultats. Les résultats obtenus étaient par ailleurs médiocres par rapport à la plupart des pays de l'OCDE. Remarques à l'intention des praticiens Le processus de transition dans les pays d'Europe centrale et orientale, ainsi qu'en Slovénie, touche à sa fin. Malgré les mesures mises en œuvre pour adapter la réglementation et les institutions compétentes aux normes européennes plus strictes, elles restent encore rigides. Dans le présent article, nous présentons les résultats de la dernière enquête sur la qualité administrative de la réglementation et des institutions en Slovénie dans le cadre d'une comparaison internationale. En ce qui concerne les recommandations en faveur d'améliorations dans la pratique, il faut avant s'efforcer de simplifier la réglementation et de la rendre plus transparente.

Eliminating administrative burdens or 'cutting red tape' is becoming a political priority in most developed countries. The main problem faced by business and individuals is that, over the past two decades, the regulations they deal with have become more complex, and the related procedures place a financial burden on both business and individuals. This article presents the results of the first comprehensive quality assessment of public institutions and regulations in the fields of tax, environment and employment in Slovenia. Business managers assessed the quality of institutions and regulations in all three areas and their impact on their operations. The research indicates that Slovenian businesses gave the lowest score to environment protection institutions, with environmental protection regulations also scoring poorly. The scores were also low compared to most OECD countries.Points for practitionersThe transition process in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Slovenia, is coming to an end. In spite of several efforts to adapt regulations and competent institutions to the higher EU standards, they still remain rigid. In this article, the results of the lastest survey of administrative quality of regulations and institutions in Slovenia with international comparison are presented. As for instructions for improvements in practice, they should above all focus on simplifying the regulations and making them more transparent.

The financial crisis has once again brought up the question of the "perfect size" of local governments and revealed a new dimension of the eternal question of financing self-governing local communities. The paper presents a comparative overview of efforts to determine the "perfect size" of municipalities and recent reforms in different countries aimed at enabling municipalities to ensure both local-level democracy and identity, and economic efficiency in the delivery of public services. One of the most popular ways for achieving this goal is to promote various forms of inter-municipal cooperation. Some forms of inter-municipal cooperation already exist in Slovenia ; a considerable breakthrough in this regard occurred in 2007, but such an approach would have been possible much earlier. Analyses show that this change is due to changes in the rules regarding co-financing. Despite the fact that neither literature nor politics in Slovenia sees inter-municipal cooperation as an alternative to merging municipalities, experiences show that practice will proceed in this direction.

The intensity of exploitation of natural resources has increased over the past decades, making environmental protection policy one of the most important priorities of government institutions. Various economic instruments, including taxation, may help policy makers in the EU meet environmental targets, among them a more secure and competitive green economy in Europe. The focus of this paper is on empirically investigating the direct effect of environmental taxes and the indirect effect of environmental expenditures sourced from environmental taxes on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the energy sector. The research applied the panel data analysis method to selected EU member states for the 1995–2010 period. The results show that the direct effect of environmental taxes on GHG emissions in the sector energy is statistically significant and negative. The indirect effects of environmental taxes resulting from environmental expenditures in the industrial and governmental sectors were found to be even stronger than the direct effect of taxes alone.

Local self-government has faced a number of challenges over the past decade. The financial crisis has revealed new dimensions of the eternal question of financing self-governing local communities, while distrust and a lack of interest in participation in local democracy among the people have led to considerations of different approaches to public decision-making concerning local issues. A comparative overview shows that the question of the "perfect size" of municipalities is currently very relevant and aimed at finding dimensions that would enable the municipality to ensure both local-level democracy and identity and economic efficiency in the delivery of public services. The most popular tool for achieving this goal is the merger of municipalities, although other approaches also exist, including various forms of inter-municipal cooperation. Some forms of inter-municipal cooperation have already taken firm hold in Slovenia, although the question of the potential impacts of alternative forms of inter-municipal cooperation on the democratic legitimacy of decision-making processes and the potential of these processes for the developmental breakthrough of Slovenian municipalities has yet to receive adequate attention.

Local self-government has faced a number of challenges over the past decade. The financial crisis has revealed new dimensions of the eternal question of financing self-governing local communities, while distrust and a lack of interest in participation in local democracy among the people have led to considerations of different approaches to public decision-making concerning local issues. A comparative overview shows that, the question of the 'perfect size' of municipalities is currently very relevant and aimed at finding dimensions that would enable the municipality to ensure both local-level democracy and identity and economic efficiency in the delivery of public services. Some forms of inter-municipal cooperation have already taken firm hold in Slovenia, although the question of the potential impacts of alternative forms of inter-municipal cooperation on the democratic legitimacy of decision-making processes and the potential of these processes for the developmental breakthrough of Slovenian municipalities has yet to receive adequate attention. Adapted from the source document.

Environmental regulations bring social benefits and contribute to lessening environmental damage. At the same time, due to the rapidly changing and complex environmental legislation, businesses incur costs, including administrative burdens. The article presents quantitative evidence on the factors that affect the compliance costs of environmental regulations. For this purpose, we used a binary model of logistic regression with the following predictors: enterprise characteristics, the relevance of environmental regulations for business operations, and the impact of environmental stimulus measures on compliance costs. The results of the study suggest that medium-sized enterprises are less likely to experience the environmental administrative burden than small enterprises. However, no difference has been found between large and small enterprises. Further, we show that environmental consents are an important determinant of the environmental administrative burden and that financial environmental measures can have a positive impact thereon.

Due to the steadily evolving concept of sustainability and new challenges for European agriculture, the sustainability concept has not been fully operationalized in practice, particularly not in the local level. This paper aims to make the concept of sustainable development operational through the elaboration of the Regional Agriculture Sustainability Index (RASI). Our research hypothesis is that sustainability aspects are not equally represented in regional agricultural development. The research confirmed large regional differences in achieving sustainability in agriculture and, additionally, particularly large differences between the various aspects of sustainability. In general, Slovenian regions show high environmental sustainability, while there was an obvious gap in the economic and social area in seven or five regions, respectively. We assume that common agricultural policy (CAP) requirements with their emphasized environmental component significantly contribute to the picture of unbalanced agricultural sustainability in Slovenian regions.

As a part of the public governance, transparency started to come forward during the New Public Management reforms, mostly for the evaluation of public sector efficiency. This article focuses on online local budget transparency (OLBT) in two neighbouring countries – Croatia and Slovenia. The article is pioneering in a comparative study of the determinants of budget transparency in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, based on a unique database and measure of transparency. The article tests the determinants of OLBT that reflect the accountability of local authorities and a cornerstone for public participation in the budget process. The following methodology was applied: using a data set of 768 Slovenian and Croatian local governments over the 2015–2017 period and testing it against several financial and socio-economic variables, and a random effects panel logistic regression, separately for Croatia, Slovenia, and a pooled sample. The results indicate that greater size of the population, higher administrative capacity and lower unemployment rate in individual local governments significantly contribute to higher levels of OLBT. This study demonstrates the possibility of developing a standardised measure of local budget transparency and using it to investigate the reasons for different levels of transparency in the two – and potentially other – CEE countries. The results of this and similar studies can serve as a basis for establishing cohesive local budget transparency policies for different countries and creating a combination of policy instruments to enhance transparency.