Foreword

Laws and regulations are essential tools for governments to promote societal well-being and economic growth. A well-developed regulatory policy – the process governments use to create policies and, if necessary, regulations – is therefore crucial for achieving policy objectives. In its ongoing effort to improve its regulatory system, the Slovak Republic asked the OECD in 2019 to assess its capacity to develop and implement new regulations compared to the practices and approaches of other countries.

Since 2007, the Slovak Republic has made great strides in developing its regulatory policy framework and has introduced a broad set of useful and important reforms, including the Unified Methodology for the Assessment of Selected Impacts in 2010. This Unified Methodology laid the foundations for a systematic assessment of the economic, social and environmental impacts of regulations. In 2018, the Slovak Republic introduced the RIA 2020 Better Regulation Strategy. By committing to an explicit whole-of-government policy for regulatory quality at the highest political level, the Slovak Republic took a crucial step towards promoting sound regulatory practice.

This OECD Regulatory Policy Review of the Slovak Republic assesses both the development of these reforms and how these reforms perform in practice. The review takes stock of regulatory policies, institutions and tools employed by the Slovak government to design, implement and enforce laws and regulations. This includes the institutional set-up for regulatory policy, ex ante and ex post evaluation of regulations, stakeholder engagement practices, multi-level regulatory governance arrangements, and regulatory enforcement and inspections. The review concludes with an analysis of the “future-proofing” of regulations and behavioural insights. It describes trends and recent developments within the Slovak Republic’s regulatory environment, identifies gaps in relation to good practices and offers policy recommendations based on international best practices to strengthen the government’s capacity to manage regulatory quality.

The methodology of the review draws on the OECD Regulatory Policy Committee’s decades of experience in better regulation as reflected in the OECD 2012 Recommendation on Regulatory Policy and Governance, which identifies the measures that government can and should take to support better regulation. The review also used guidance and results provided in the 2014 OECD Best Practice Principles for Regulatory Policy: Regulatory Enforcement and Inspections, the OECD Enforcement and Inspections Toolkit, and the 2018 OECD Regulatory Policy Outlook, and the 2020 Best Practice Principles for Regulatory Policy: Regulatory Impact Assessments.

The OECD Regulatory Policy Committee leads the programme on regulatory governance with the support of the Regulatory Policy Division of the OECD Public Governance Directorate. Regulatory policy country reviews are a key part of the Committee’s programme. The Directorate’s mission is to help governments at all levels design and implement strategic, evidence-based and innovative policies to strengthen public governance; respond effectively to diverse and disruptive economic, social and environmental challenges and deliver on government’s commitment to citizens. The goal of the programme is to support sustainable economic and social development through sound government frameworks that enable evidence-based policymaking.

A draft version of this report was approved and declassified at the 22nd session of the Regulatory Policy Committee on 2 April 2020.