Overregulation: how do we cope with it?

The recent cover of the weekly The Economist issue had a picture of red tape and the title “The revolt against regulation”. Some statistics from the articles on the topic: in the US, federal regulations now exceed 180,000 pages, up from 20,000 in the early 1960s; in the past five years the European Parliament has enacted more than twice as many laws as America; red tape costs the French economy close to 4% of GDP every year. In this interview with Vincent van Dijk, Senior Advisor on Norm engineering and rule-based solutions, we invite consideration of ‘norm engineering’ as one of potential solutions of the growing problem, which we, customs practitioners, are also witnessing in our specific field.