Red tape is a big cost burden to many governments and not-for-profit organizations. Each time a person makes a rule or a regulation they are imposing a social cost on society in terms of logistical delays, an extra step in a process, and cost of regulators.
It would be good if all countries publicly disclose the cost of their red tape by indicating the total number of regulations introduced in the past decade and the total increase in the number of regulatory pages over the same period. The UN and UN agencies should look at similar statistics as well. The findings may be ghastly. Some regulations have special benefits to society, particularly as it relates to crime, health-care, and environmental and public safety. However, when a nation overly regulates it can put a big price tag on its GDP.
At the micro level, big companies and international non-profits should also examine the cost of their internal bureaucracy to reduce the cost of red tape. Red tape should not confuse with operational type functions like management, accounting, policy-making, etc. However, most of the cost of overhead embeds in these overhead functions.
One big social cost in many developing countries is the red tape to clear goods in and out of ports (air ports and sea ports). It is common to see tons upon tons of packages sitting idle at ports (awaiting clearance) due to government red tape. When most developing countries must import most of their capital and consumption goods, having these items lay idle in ports is a tremendous loss to national output.
Government, business and all other non-profit organizations may need to reform the regulators. Someone must go around and say "Rule Maker, Rule Maker, give me your rules?" All the rules should then be codified as either "worthless", "duplicate", or a necessity for "order and oversight". People start writing rules without first gathering all the roaming rules in existence. Some codification would help in restricting rule multiplication.
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