The renewed political prioritisation of regulatory simplification and burden reduction has led governments to initiate a wave of new initiatives. Drawing on experiences from 35 jurisdictions, this chapter sets out the goals and various tools of recent initiatives, as well as implementation challenges reported by governments, particularly in relation to measurement and the use of digital tools. It also reflects on government views on broader institutional barriers to successful simplification and burden reduction, including co-ordination gaps and limited internal and political support.
Smart Regulations, Strong Business
Enabling Growth and Societal Protection in a Fast‑Changing World
Abstract
As governments are confronted with the challenge of growing regulatory burdens in a fragile economic context, efforts to simplify regulations and administrative processes are gaining prominence in reform agendas. The OECD’s 2025 Economic Outlook highlights the need for measures to manage the growing regulatory stock and associated burdens as a way to boost productivity and economic dynamism (OECD, 2025[1]). In Europe, both the Draghi (2024[2]) and Letta (2024[3]) reports similarly highlight regulatory simplification as a key lever to strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and improve the functioning of the Single Market.
Efforts to reduce the burden of regulation are not new and have taken various specific forms, dating back to early deregulatory reforms in the 1980s. By 2000, most OECD countries had introduced government programmes aimed at reducing administrative burdens (OECD, 2003[4]). The policy toolkit has expanded over time, with regulatory rationalisation to remove outdated or duplicative rules, to newer applications of digital tools to reduce “red tape” (see the annexed typology for an overview of approaches to simplification and Box 1.1 for their evolution). Despite decades of efforts that represent important progress, achievements, and learnings, evidence suggests that previous simplification programmes may have struggled to meet expectations or deliver lasting results. In 2010, an OECD report observed that “despite their popularity and political attractiveness, and the considerable resources invested in them, the [simplification] programmes have not been perceived as bringing sufficient concrete relief” – raising questions as to the value-for-money offered by the agenda, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (OECD, 2010[5]). And, ultimately, as Chapter 1 highlights, despite decades of reform and simplification efforts, the overall trajectory of the regulatory landscape still points to growing regulatory stock and complexity.
Several structural challenges have been observed over the years, underlying the mixed outcomes to date. For instance, digital tools that set out to streamline processes can simply shift administrative burdens, rather than actually reduce them (Bozeman, Youtie and Jung, 2020[6]). Moreover, while the Standard Cost Model has become a popular methodology for quantifying burdens, applying it comprehensively can be technically challenging and making it the linchpin of entire programmes can prove overly expensive (OECD, 2011[7]). Simplification efforts targeting individual procedures rather than the overall system can also have limited impact (OECD, 2011[7]) and co-ordination has historically proven a challenge. Fragmentation and inter-agency co-ordination gaps hampered ambitious reform efforts of the 1990s (OECD, 1997[8]) – and since then, through innovation and globalisation, policy challenges have only become more interconnected and change at a very fast pace. Additionally, promoting coherence in regulations across different levels of government and good regulatory practices at the subnational level remains a gap among OECD Members (OECD, 2025[9]). Finally, institutional inertia can make it difficult for programmes to alter an entrenched regulatory culture and sustain progress over time – facing loss of momentum once the “low-hanging fruits” have been picked, and being unable to “run the last kilometre” of reform (OECD, 2011[7]).
This chapter therefore raises a central question: with renewed ambition and a new wave of initiatives, is this time really different or are governments once again risking the same failure to deliver lasting results? To explore this, the evidence begins by highlighting how political prioritisation has translated into concrete action. It will then zoom in on the goals and methods at the core of current government efforts – broadly familiar approaches that are tailored to the current context with new tools and targets – and highlight practical challenges. The chapter then turns to the broader institutional barriers that hinder implementation, analysing how co-ordination gaps across and within governments and limited internal and political support continue to constrain the effectiveness of simplification initiatives and their ability to deliver lasting reductions in regulatory burden.
In the wake of renewed political ambition and prioritisation on regulatory simplification and burden reduction, governments have initiated a wave of new initiatives. In doing so, they are drawing from a broad toolkit. The approaches they choose shape how regulatory systems are transformed, and whether businesses experience benefits in practice. Survey evidence set out below illustrates how countries are translating priorities into action, revealing the goals, methods and instruments being leveraged in the pursuit of simplification – as well as the challenges that they face.
Survey responses reflect the growing recognition that burden reduction and simplification are increasingly viewed as a strategic priority, as opposed to a technical exercise. Government respondents in about three-quarters (74%) of countries report that reducing burdens and simplifying regulation has been given a high or very high level of priority since 2022 (Figure 3.1).
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
The vast majority of surveyed governments are translating priorities into practice, with nearly all of them (91%) having launched burden reduction measures since 2022. For example, Colombia launched Estado Simple, Colombia Agil, a platform for streamlining administrative procedures and interactions between businesses, citizens and governments in 2022; Brazil launched a National Strategy for Regulatory Improvement in 2023; Switzerland’s Federal Act on Reducing Regulatory Costs for Businesses came into force in 2024; and, Poland adopted an economic plan that elevated deregulatory efforts to the national level, establishing a Government Deregulation Team in 2025.
Most new initiatives are driven by economic and efficiency goals (Figure 3.2). This reflects both how a challenging economic outlook is driving renewed momentum for simplification, and that simplification is identified as a key lever of government response to pressing economic challenges across a variety of countries and regions. For instance, for the European Union, simplification is “at the heart of its agenda for competitiveness and prosperity” (European Commission, 2026[10]).
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
Today’s renewed ambitions also build upon a shared recognition among both government respondents and business organisations that this wave must deliver more lasting results than previous ones, which are considered to have only been partially successful (Figure 3.3).
Note: In Germany and Türkiye, two business organisations answered the survey respectively; where the answers of the two respective organisations diverged, they were excluded from the aggregate results.
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
Understanding the methods and tools that governments are deploying – and whether they are working – is the essential first step for assessing how this latest wave of simplification initiatives is taking shape in practice, and whether it has the potential to deliver lasting results. A variety of tools are deployed today to simplify and streamline regulation and procedures. This section sets out this toolkit, as well as the challenges that they face.
Many of the tools that government respondents report using today are not new, but rather part of a longstanding simplification toolkit. Earlier waves of simplification efforts also featured evaluating regulations ex post (after they have been implemented) with a view to identifying inefficiencies, setting measurable reduction targets, or offsetting through “one-in, x-out” rules (Figure 3.4). However, the uptake of such approaches has not always been systematic or consistent over time. For example, Australia, Denmark, and the United Kingdom all adopted and eventually abolished “one-in, x-out” schemes (Steinebach, Hinterleitner and Fernández‐i‐Marín, 2024[11]). Ex post evaluations carry promise and have gained modest traction over time, but remain largely underused: Regulatory Policy Outlooks since 2015 document the trajectory of adoption and evolution of ex post evaluations, but as of 2025, its use remains far from being systematic and significantly less advanced than stakeholder engagement and regulatory impact assessments (OECD, 2025[9]). Chapter 4 further discusses the need for governments to better harness ex post evaluations for ongoing simplification rather than in an ad hoc fashion.
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
Digital tools, employed by most countries, are more novel to current simplification efforts, but – partially by virtue of this novelty – also face systemic challenges in uptake (see subsection 3.2.1). More familiar tools like measurable burden reduction targets grapple with fundamental gaps in how burden is measured, which continue to limit effectiveness (see subsection 3.2.2).
3.2.1. Digital tools
Digitalisation emerges as a promising central feature of the latest wave of simplification initiatives. Technology offers new opportunities to identify burdens and to make regulatory requirements easier for businesses to navigate, streamline interactions between business and government, reduce paperwork, and simplify procedures. In Slovenia, for instance, the paper-based process of submitting certificates for medical absences from work has been digitised end-to-end for employees, employers, and healthcare providers; this has led to savings of EUR 11.5 million (Ministry of Digital Transformation, 2023[12]). However, despite the promise of digital tools, only 17% of government respondents indicate they are used systematically to help identify and address burdens. Data suggests that many governments are at an early stage of employing technologies for burden reduction (37% of government respondents indicate their use of digital tools is limited or at a testing stage). Figure 3.5 illustrates how governments apply digital tools in a variety of ways to support simplification efforts, but even the most frequent use (data analysis, sharing, and reporting) is reported by less than half of countries.
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
More novel applications, like chatbots and predictive modelling, remain largely underused – but various practice examples illustrate their relevance. Only 20% of countries are employing digital tools to provide personalised regulatory advice. In the Slovak Republic (Financial Administration of the Slovak Republic, 2025[13]) and Slovenia (Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, 2025[14]), for instance, their chatbots provide tailored guidance to businesses and citizens for complying with tax regulations.
Digital tools can also be employed to identify regulatory barriers and efficiencies. Iceland employs a tool that helps to identify administrative inefficiencies while automating permit application processes: when businesses fill out permit applications, the Straumurinn tool automatically retrieves relevant business data from various government registries, eliminating the need for businesses to manually fill out information or upload documents. In performing this function, the tool also identifies and logs cross-agency data exchanges, creating a map of data flows that can be analysed to help identify redundancies and bottlenecks in administrative processes (Digital Iceland, n.d.[15]). The Inter-American Development Bank is also exploring the application of AI tools to help identify and address regulatory and administrative inefficiencies. This includes applying AI to audit the regulatory stock, generating matrices of regulatory barriers traced to specific provisions and verifiable textual evidence. Their tools also reconstruct administrative processes from an analysis of current regulations and pinpoint inefficiencies, linking operational bottlenecks to their regulatory source and proposing optimised workflows (IADB, forthcoming[16]).
Various pilots also demonstrate how artificial intelligence can be employed to measure burden.: For instance, the Regulatory Burden Index is a pilot AI-supported tool commissioned by the European Economic and Social Committee that can use semantic text embeddings and large language models to monitor and quantify the burden of EU laws in real time (European Economic and Social Committee, 2025[17]).
User-friendly technical platforms can greatly support individual policy teams to digitise – and thereby simplify – the procedures they are managing. Box 3.1 illustrates how New Zealand’s FormBuilder.govt initiative makes it easier for agencies to design and manage online forms while reducing duplication, harmonising user experiences across agencies, and overcoming skill and resource constraints that often slow the digitisation of public services.
Launched in 2024, FormBuilder.govt is a government-run, no-code digital platform that enables New Zealand ministries and subnational authorities to design, publish and manage secure online forms without bespoke software development. The initiative is led and maintained by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
FormBuilder was developed to address persistent challenges in the digitalisation of form-based public services (e.g. licences, permits, and registrations), such as high development costs and lengthy lead times associated with public procurement, fragmented user experiences resulting from inconsistent interfaces and requirements across agencies, and duplicative data entry that obliges businesses to provide the same information repeatedly to different authorities.
Interoperability
The platform is integrated with the New Zealand Business Number (NZBN) and NZ Post lookups to improve data accuracy and user experience. Forms are designed to meet privacy and accessibility standards, and the hosted service allows agencies to publish behind a RealMe login or as public forms with email receipt or bulk download options.
Identifying inefficiencies
If agencies digitise complex or poorly designed procedures without reform, they risk embedding inefficiency in digital form. FormBuilder.govt incorporates built-in analytics that enable agencies to identify high-friction points, monitor completion rates and refine services iteratively.
Skills and capacity-building
The platform empowers non-technical policy and operational teams to design and update online forms directly, thereby shortening delivery timelines and reducing reliance on external IT providers. The MBIE supports adoption through training sessions and regular webinars, which facilitate capacity-building.
Source: S4S Survey (Digital.GOVT.NZ, n.d.[18]); (Business Connect, 2025[19]).
The top reported use of digital tools is in supporting data analysis, sharing and reporting. These solutions, as employed by Denmark and Estonia (Box 3.2), can significantly help to streamline reporting burdens. However, to be effective and scaled, they require consistent definitions, formats and reporting structures so that information can be collected, processed and exchanged seamlessly across organisations and IT systems. The challenge of getting quality and consistent data emerges in both examples presented in Box 3.2. In the Danish case, some key indicators of sustainability accounting lack harmonised international methodological standards, e.g. on biodiversity. The Estonian Government highlighted the following as key barriers to the introduction of the Real-Time Economy vision: 1) data that is not based on a common semantic model, and 2) data that cannot be exchanged in machine-readable or open-use formats.
Denmark’s Automated Sustainability Reporting Initiative
The Danish Business Authority’s (DBA) Automated Sustainability Reporting initiative aims to streamline sustainability accounting by automating processes related to data collection, management, and sharing. This is in response to costs for businesses stemming from new EU regulations on sustainability reporting, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive – which DBA research identified as being due to fragmented data sources, reliance on manual processes, and the absence of standardised digital formats and interoperable systems.
The initiative features three main elements, underpinned by close co-operation with businesses, IT providers, and standard setters:
1. it develops common digital data standards and formats, similar to those used for e-invoicing, so that systems can “speak the same language”;
2. it pilots a common open digital infrastructure that allows businesses and authorities to exchange sustainability data in a structured way; and,
3. it improves access to reliable external data, including emission factor databases to facilitate more accurate and less resource-intensive climate accounting.
Estonia’s Real-Time Economy
Estonia’s Real-Time Economy (RTE) vision for 2020-2027 involves replacing paper-based business transactions and administrative procedures by automatic exchange of digital, structured and machine-readable data in standardised formats between companies and with the government – which includes the transition to automated reporting. According to the Estonian government, implementation of real-time data exchange solutions (e-invoices, e-receipts, data-driven reporting to the state, e-waybills, etc.) are expected to save the business sector more than EUR 200 million a year.
The initiative is led by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, and combines legal reforms, technical standards, and institutional co-ordination to replace manual reporting with machine-readable data exchange across sectors. Central public bodies work alongside businesses, SMEs, and software providers through co-design, pilots, and a cross-agency Data-Based Reporting Steering Group. The initiative spans the full regulatory cycle. Early pilots (such as automated financial reporting, digital payroll data exchange, and agricultural field logbooks) have demonstrated potential to eliminate redundant reporting, improve data quality, and support more responsive policymaking, although challenges remain around legal harmonisation, system complexity, SME digital readiness, and trust in data sharing.
Source: S4S Survey; (OECD, 2025[20]); Estonia RTE; Estonia Data STG.
The Danish and Estonian examples illustrate the most common challenge that countries report facing in applying digital tools for simplification: data-related issues (Figure 3.6). Many initiatives depend on high-quality, shareable data, yet data are often fragmented across agencies, stored in incompatible formats or altogether unavailable. The examples also illustrate how different challenges are interlinked – fundamental data issues can challenge interoperability of systems, prospects for scaling up, and delivery of intended results. Without addressing such underlying constraints, governments risk digitising existing inefficiencies or investing in tools that ultimately fail to deliver results.
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
Issues in implementing digital tools can unintentionally shift or even exacerbate burdens. For instance, ministries, departments and subnational governments employing IT systems that are not interoperable can prevent authorities from sharing information or automating processes, forcing businesses to continue submitting the same data multiple times. To this end, some respondents highlighted how the European Union’s 2024 Interoperable Europe Act – which established a common legal framework to strengthen cross-border interoperability and co-operation in the public sector across the EU (European Commission, 2022[21]) – may foster improved data use and digital application moving forward.
Crucially, many administrations face shortages of the specialised digital and data skills needed to design, implement and maintain advanced digital solutions effectively. Echoing this, a separate OECD survey of 57 regulators on staffing and funding arrangements highlights that more than half have difficulties hiring well-qualified staff, especially in digital domains (OECD, 2022[22]). Centres of expertise can help governments to address such skills gaps – for instance, France’s PEReN (Pôle d’expertise de la régulation numérique) is an interdepartmental office comprised of specialised computer and data science experts providing technical support and guidance across the French administration. Regulators and policy teams can call upon PEReN for support with digital platforms, whether for technical assistance, to carry out research, or to share expertise on their regulation (PEReN, n.d.[23]).
3.2.2. Measurement and methodologies
While the use of digital tools in simplification has expanded, progress in other areas – such as measurable burden reduction targets – is less clear. Early examples date back to the 1990s. The Netherlands, a pioneer in burden measurement, used the MISTRAL system to establish a 1994 baseline level of administrative burden costs and set reduction targets relative to that baseline (the targets were a reduction of 10% by 1998 and 25% by 2002). Estimates suggested these efforts led to a reduction of nearly 7% by 2000. Despite early uptake, progress over time appears less clear, with measurable targets employed by 43% of countries surveyed in 2000 (OECD, 2003[24]) compared to 44% surveyed in 2025. Limited adoption of measurable targets may partially reflect the difficulty of measuring burdens comprehensively and accurately, a core challenge highlighted in this section.
Twenty three per cent of countries have established a baseline level of administrative and regulatory burden, according to government respondents. While the United Kingdom established a baseline of GBP 22.4 billion for the annual administrative burden of regulation on businesses as part of its committing to a 25% reduction under its 2025 Regulation Action Plan (HM Treasury, 2025[25]), a minority of countries to have done so. Although baselines can help to track and communicate progress, the exercise of establishing a baseline can itself be an overly costly and complex (OECD, 2010[5]).
In part, the difficulty in establishing a clear baseline for burden reduction targets reflects the practical challenges policymakers face in measuring the costs – and benefits – of regulations more broadly. As shown in Figure 3.7, barriers to measurement are both widespread and multifaceted across countries. Government respondents most frequently cite practical constraints, such as incomplete, outdated or unavailable data, as well as limited resources to conduct robust measurement for individual regulatory proposals. Quantifying burden requires detailed information on how rules translate into real-world compliance activities, from staff time spent completing reports to investments in new processes or technologies. These impacts are often dispersed (sometimes cumulatively) across businesses, sectors and jurisdictions, making them difficult to capture consistently.
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
Digital tools can help with navigating and addressing some key challenges in the application of costing methodologies. Finland, for instance, developed the Regulatory Burden Calculator. Built as an Excel-based tool grounded in the Standard Cost Model, it provides officials with ready-to-use data on wages, overheads, working hours and firm characteristics to estimate the administrative costs of regulatory proposals and apply the “one-in, one-out” principle. By standardising inputs and simplifying calculations, the tool enables policymakers to more easily quantify and track the impacts of regulation on businesses. It has also enabled the Ministry of Economic Affairs to track changes in the annual regulatory burden resulting from national legislation since 2017, supporting more transparent and evidence-based burden reduction efforts (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland, 2026[26]).
More fundamentally, policymakers face the challenge that existing methods for measuring regulatory costs and benefits may not be fit-for-purpose in the current context. Traditional approaches like the Standard Cost Model focus on administrative burdens rather than substantive compliance costs, and struggle to capture indirect effects (like diverting resources away from innovation or discouraging entrepreneurship) or the dynamic impacts of regulation in increasingly complex economies. They are also not well-equipped to assess cumulative burdens, which arise from the interaction and layering of multiple requirements across sectors, policy areas, and jurisdictions. Policymakers may also lack methods for incorporating more dynamic evidence, like qualitative insights or real-time data. In a rapidly evolving regulatory and technological landscape, these gaps can leave policymakers trying to measure a moving target.
Additionally, systematic measurement of regulatory benefits remains comparatively limited across OECD members (OECD, 2025[9]), with positive outcomes like improved safety and well-being often being harder to quantify than costs. This risks biased decisions and trade‑offs – including on where to target simplification efforts – that focus on the removal of direct costs rather than a complete picture of regulatory value.
Emerging tools reflect efforts to address persisting measurement gaps by making it easier and more accessible to quantify benefits and indirect effects. For instance, the Australian Social Value Bank helps policymakers to employ wellbeing valuation – a method for assigning monetary values to social outcomes, including primary benefits to individuals (such as improved self-esteem or stopping smoking) and secondary benefits to government (such as healthcare cost savings or increased tax revenue) – with pre-filled figures for the Australian context (Australian Social Value Bank, 2017[27]). Another tool, RegValue, includes the key feature of considering intangible burdens, such as the psychosocial effect of poorly designed or executed regulatory processes and communication. This extends approaches such as Wellbeing Impact Assessments, which address non‑economic impacts, such as those on the environment, community wellbeing, and First Nations peoples (ANZSOG, 2025[28]). These tools build upon established techniques to monetise benefits by considering the reduction in costs, or by assigning a market value to positive regulatory outcomes (European Commission, 2023[29]). The Swedish Implementation Council (2025[30]) has also carried out work on developing a calculation method to quantify the impact of regulatory changes on Swedish competitiveness, in industries where sufficient data is available. However, further work is needed to develop and broadly employ methods and tools that can comprehensively measure the dynamic impacts of regulation, including costs, benefits, and indirect effects.
Being able to effectively measure the impacts of regulation – whether costs, benefits, or burdens – is fundamental in order to effectively target and calibrate simplification efforts and the lack of suitable measurement methods and tools remains a gap. Without a reliably measured evidence base, efforts risk focusing only on what is most visible or politically salient. Robust measurement enables governments to identify priorities for simplification, assess trade-offs, and track progress over time. Ultimately, this helps to ensure that simplification goals result in meaningful changes without undermining policy goals.
Despite renewed political attention and new initiatives and tools being launched, turning simplification ambitions into tangible and lasting reductions in regulatory burden is still held back by institutional barriers. Survey responses point to a familiar pattern: policymakers often recognise the need to streamline regulation but encounter persistent challenges in co-ordinating with other ministries and levels of government, as well as in garnering sufficient support to deliver lasting change.
3.3.1. Multi-level and whole-of-government co-ordination challenges
Simplification is made more complex by the fact that burdens originate at different levels of government and policy areas – and manifest across various sectors of the economy. Many businesses operate within regulatory frameworks that span multiple sectors, ministries and levels of government. For example, a construction project may need to comply simultaneously with national labour and environmental regulations, regional land-use planning rules, and municipal building permits and inspections, each administered by different authorities and rooted in different pieces of legislation. When different authorities design and implement rules independently, simplification measures introduced by one body may be offset by requirements maintained or introduced elsewhere. Businesses may still face overlapping procedures, duplicated reporting obligations or inconsistent guidance from different regulators. The data necessary to effectively design and target burdens, such as cumulative impacts, may also be dispersed across institutional siloes.
A lack of co-ordination among different levels of government emerges as one of the most significant barriers to effective simplification efforts. In 60% of countries, government respondents identify fragmentation between national, regional and local authorities as a factor that undermines the success of burden reduction initiatives. To a slightly lesser extent, co-ordination challenges also arise within national governments. In 40% of countries, government respondents report that a lack of co-ordination across ministries and regulatory bodies limits progress in reducing regulatory burden (Figure 3.8).
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
Recognising these challenges, most governments have introduced institutional mechanisms to support a more co-ordinated, streamlined approach to simplification. In Portugal, for instance, the Administrative Modernisation Agency centrally co-ordinates and promotes a whole-of-government approach to simplification, including the administration of the Government’s multi-sector, multi-level, and multi-annual Simplex reform programme that entails legal amendments, procedural reforms, and digital transformation. The Agency sets common priorities, methods, and monitoring requirements for ministries, agencies, and municipalities as they implement simplification within their respective jurisdictions.
Additionally, consistent with broad recognition of construction, licensing, and permitting as key challenges (see Chapter 2), some governments have recently established bodies dedicated to streamlining associated regulatory approvals. Both Canada’s Major Projects Office (Government of Canada, 2026[31]) and Ireland’s Infrastructure Regulatory Simplification Unit (Government of Ireland, 2026[32]) help streamline regulations and approval processes associated with infrastructure projects.
As illustrated in Figure 3.9, countries employ a variety of co-ordination arrangements, including dedicated units, central oversight bodies and interministerial structures tasked with guiding simplification efforts across government. In practice, some countries have multiple mechanisms co-existing. These mechanisms aim to promote a whole-of-government perspective, helping align reform efforts across ministries, track progress and ensure that burden reduction initiatives are implemented consistently across policy areas.
Note: Government respondents were asked to select all answer options that apply.
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
However, the reach of these mechanisms remains uneven. While 94% of countries report having a co‑ordination mechanism for simplification, only 31% indicate that subnational actors are included in these arrangements. This limited participation constrains governments’ ability to address regulatory burdens that arise from interactions between national and subnational frameworks. For example, land regulation tends to be multi-level, involving a mix of national, regional and local regulations, where national governments typically set the legal framework, while local and regional governments typically make detailed land planning decisions. This has led to a high degree of fragmentation and overlap in land use regulation mandates across a quarter of OECD member and candidate countries. Without stronger multi-level governance arrangements, simplification initiatives risk remaining confined to reforms at the central government level rather than addressing the full range of regulatory obligations that businesses encounter in practice.
3.3.2. Lack of internal and political support
Compounding the challenges of co-ordinating simplification efforts across government is the difficulty of garnering sufficient internal and political support to sustain momentum and deliver lasting results. Governments report that securing sufficient resources – such as time, staff, funding, and technical skills – is the biggest barrier they face in delivering on burden reduction effort (Figure 3.10). Several governments report that no specific staff or budgetary resources are allocated to support burden reduction and simplification efforts. Simplification initiatives require ministries and regulators to review existing rules and processes, co-ordinate across policy areas, upgrade systems and change long-standing administrative practices. These efforts can run counter to entrenched administrative cultures and be difficult to prioritise alongside competing policy responsibilities, particularly when the benefits of simplification are delayed and diffuse while the required effort is immediate and concentrated. These resource pressures also point to a deeper requirement for success: simplification is unlikely to endure without sustained backing, both from political leadership and from within the public administration.
Source: OECD S4S Surveys (2025).
In trying to overcome internal resistance, governments employ a range of incentives, pressures and accountability mechanisms to encourage ministries and agencies (whose primary mandates may lie elsewhere) to deliver results on simplification initiatives. Approaches include publishing commitments in national strategies, setting formal targets, and creating steering groups to provide direction and oversight, linking simplification efforts to performance frameworks of officials and programmes, and introducing central monitoring or review functions to track progress. Most government respondents cited requirements for ministries to report to high-level, central, or political figures as the main incentive used, highlighting reporting as a key lever to foster accountability in simplification. 69% of government respondents have obligations to report the progress on regulatory burden reduction and simplification to the Government and/or the Parliament or its committees. In the European Commission, each Commissioner prepares an Annual Progress Report on Simplification, Implementation and Enforcement to share with the European Council and Parliament, covering progress made in their area of responsibility. This is one aspect of the Commission’s comprehensive whole-of-government approach to simplification engaging all Commissioners, which also includes common government-wide targets and cross-cutting initiatives like the “Omnibus” package, stress testing of the full EU acquis, implementation dialogues, the Commission’s work programme, and more (European Commission, 2025[33]).
Assigning high-level or political oversight is a common approach across countries to ensure accountability and encourage progress. In Finland, the State Secretary chairs the steering group for deregulation and reduction of administrative burden; the Programme of the Prime Minister’s Government sets a target of the number of regulations to reduce (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, 2025[34]). Incidentally, 86% of countries report having a specific minister or high-level official accountable for promoting government-wide progress on regulatory burden reduction and simplification. OECD guidance similarly emphasises that regulatory reform efforts are most effective when they are anchored by commitment at the highest political level and supported by strong central oversight (OECD, 2011[7]). It is also crucial that this form of leadership can help elevate simplification as a cross-government priority, signalling its importance to participating ministries and sustaining political backing, ensuring that simplification efforts remain visible and supported even as policy agendas evolve.
Despite the apparent emphasis on accountability in simplification efforts, systematic evaluation remains limited. Only 57% of countries report having assessed the effectiveness or efficiency of ongoing or past burden reduction initiatives, leaving many governments without clear evidence of whether reforms are delivering the intended results. Without regular evaluation, it becomes difficult to distinguish initiatives that generate meaningful improvements from those that produce only temporary or symbolic reductions, or those that fail to deliver at all. Strengthening evaluation practices is therefore essential, not only to demonstrate progress, but also to enable governments to learn from experience, refine their approaches, and deliver more durable outcomes.
Ultimately, learning from the limitations of current and previous reforms will prove key to the success of this current wave of simplification. As the evidence sets out, challenges remain persistent and prominent in simplification efforts – including but not limited to digital application, measurement constraints, co-ordination gaps, and institutional resistance. If governments are to overcome these challenges and meet expectations in this wave of simplification, they will need to do something different. The final chapter therefore builds upon this diagnosis to offer policy considerations helping to guide governments toward a more effective way forward, harnessing the simplification toolkit to deliver meaningful and lasting burden reduction.
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