Tracking progress in the EU’s simplification effort
Europe’s regulatory burden has become a growing drag on competitiveness, disproportionately affecting SMEs and mid-caps and undermining investment, innovation, and scale-up across the Single Market.
In response, the European Commission has launched its most ambitious simplification agenda to date, centred on Omnibus legislation packages, reinforced Better Regulation tools, greater proportionality by company size, stronger Single Market enforcement, and the digitalisation of legislative and compliance processes.
While the agenda marks a qualitative shift in ambition and coherence, progress on the ground remains limited: most measures are still under negotiation, implementation risks persist at Member State level, and structural incentives for regulatory complexity remain largely unaddressed - particularly in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
To turn political commitment into measurable competitiveness gains, the EU must now prioritise delivery over declarations by strengthening inter-institutional accountability, safeguarding policy objectives, investing in administrative and digital capacity, and systematically reducing both existing and future regulatory burdens.
This paper was originally published as part of GLOBSEC’s Competitiveness Tracker. It examines the EU’s simplification effort on 5 dimensions:
1. Reduce the cumulative regulatory burden ex-post
2. Limit new regulatory burdens ex-ante
3. Make regulation more sensitive to business size
4. Reinforce the EU Single Market
5. Digitalise legislative and compliance processes
The analysis is complemented by traffic-light assessments that measure the adequacy of the policy agenda considering the challenges at hand, and progress across the EU and in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where pertinent.
Philipp Lausberg is a Senior Policy Analyst in the European Political Economy Programme at the European Policy Centre.
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