Cutting the costs of communication

Andrzej Wróbel: Entrepreneurs keep repeating that Poland has a negative climate for business and entrepreneurship. Why is that?

Andrzej Kaczmarek: I think that the problem is in communication between the Ministry and businesses. Most of it takes place via the media or through letters usually before the Ministry manages to complete a certain regulation.

How does the Ministry support entrepreneurs?

Last year the Council of Ministers adopted a program of regulatory reform called 'The Entrepreneur has the right.' Our goal is to create new laws and change existing ones to support economic activity. It is also a mental process because for the last couple of years the regulations have always been in a controversial area, on the verge of war between the administration and entrepreneurs.

There is an assumption that if new regulations are introduced their aim is to destroy something or make it more difficult. All measures that we are currently taking will improve the economic environment. Thanks to our program we will be able to lower the regulatory and administrative costs for businesses. Every time businesses contact the administration it consumes time and money. The European Commission estimates the costs of this to Poland at some $10 [zł.2.87] billion. We want to reduce it by 25 percent.

What are you proud of as a Deputy Economy Minister?

Our best work is all the projects we have done in cooperation with the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development (PARP), including the seed capital and venture capital solutions. These are completely new and we managed to prepare them much faster than, for example, Great Britain. Here I would also mention the new platform for financing SMEs prepared along with the Warsaw Stock Exchange. 

What do you consider the biggest failure of the Ministry?

The Act on Freedom of Economic Activity. The process stopped at the end of summer. One of the most important parts of the amendment, the 'one-stop shop', could not be set into motion because the IT infrastructure linking all the government departments was not in place. The regulations introduced in the 2004 Act were impossible to meet because, for example, many gminas do not have the necessary IT infrastructure.