Many countries are trying to streamline their bureaucracies by eliminating redundancies in their departments and agencies.
Saudi Arabia has a Ministry of Commerce and Industry, a Ministry of Finance, and a Ministry of Economy and Planning. In addition to these economically aligned ministries there is the Capital Market Authority, the General Investment Authority and other agencies involved with all things financial.
What’s the role of the Ministry of Commerce that is different from the Ministry of Economy and Planning? And what makes the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, the Ministry of Finance, and the Capital Market Authority different in their respective roles? And how do the Ministries of Labor and Commerce coordinate in their overlapping duties in the area of issuing licenses and permits?
There aren’t enough pages in this newspaper to list the overlaps and redundancies in the ministries and government agencies. And are there ways to “outsource” certain tasks? For example, can the chambers of commerce and industry, which already play significant roles in the country’s economic policies, handle the issuing of business visas for executives? And how many licenses do we need to construct a factory anyway?
I think we should form something I like to call a “Saudi Economic Circle” that handles all licenses. It’s not easy to outline everything this group would do except to say it might allow us to consolidate the licensing tasks into one agency, and perhaps allow us to then consolidate other government bodies and streamline the entire process.
And it would be nice to establish a system that not only streamlines bureaucracy, but expedites requests from the public.
