faced with the exasperation of bosses, the government wants to fight against excess paperwork

Emmanuel Macron will launch, on Tuesday, November 21, a plan to help companies, particularly the smallest, to win more international markets.

According to the Élysée, barely 2% of small and medium-sized businesses in France are involved in exports compared to 9% in Germany. The desire of the Head of State is therefore to increase the share of SMEs that export and the government promises to select around a hundred companies whose products and services can have international markets to support them in fairs and international trade fairs. They offer, for example, to cover part of their travel, to facilitate their access to financing so that they can raise funds, or even to put them in contact with state actors who engage in economic diplomacy.

A reduction in necessary regulations and standards

According to employers, these regulations and standards are obstacles to winning markets abroad, even more so when competition rages between the United States and China, countries that do not bother to so many constraints. In the Tribune Sundayof November 19, the three employers’ organizations, Medef, CPME, and U2P also sent a letter, a sort of manifesto to Emmanuel Macron to ask him to simplify life for businesses as quickly as possible.

The Seb company, which sells household appliances, for example, is worried because Europe is currently working on a repairability index for vacuum cleaners. A product rating system which should allow consumers to choose those which are most easily repairable and encourage manufacturers to bet less on obsolescence, that is to say the aging of devices. Except that there already exists a repairability index in France, which Europe does not want to take up. There is therefore a risk of there being two different indices, which, according to Seb, will complicate the production of his vacuum cleaners. Business leaders tell you a lot about examples like this and they ask the government to stop this regulatory inflation.

The government is well aware of the problem since Bruno Le Maire has just launched a vast consultation. The Minister of the Economy dreams of adopting a major law on administrative simplification in spring 2024. This is not the first time that a government has committed to putting an end to excess paperwork. Nicolas Sarkozy or François Hollande had made the same promise to business leaders without success.