Selected Case Studies

Reform Case: Regulatory Simplification in South East Europe
Since 2007, Jacobs and Associates has assisted the World Bank IFC/FIAS to develop and implement a systemic reform strategy to improve the regulatory environment at subnational levels of government in the region. Our work focused on launching regulatory guillotines in 3 municipalities of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), 4 in Serbia and 3 in Montenegro. For each ‘municipal guillotine’, a complete registry of licenses and permits was created and posted on internet. This inventory has then be reviewed by stakeholders and by a task force of lawyers and economists verifying the legality, necessity and business friendliness of all formalities listed by public authorities. Only those publicly justified have been included in an internet-based registry. Overall, the municipal guillotines reduced by 10 to 40 % the number of formalities and simplified more than 2/3 of the remaining ones. Many of the reforms targeted costly formalities documented in the Doing Business Reports.

Reform Case: Building the regulatory framework in East Africa’s Common Market
The Regulatory Capacity Review of the EAC, carried out in 2010 by Jacobs and Associates, is a major analysis of the EAC institutions. With the IFC, we reviewed the capacities of the EAC institutions to develop, adopt, and implement the regulatory policies needed for the EAC Common Market to work effectively in the five Partner States (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi)