Georgia and Armenia outrank most of the EU’s East on economic freedom. Membership need not change that.
On October 12 Ursula von der Leyen asked EU leaders to sign a “pact against gold-plating”, the habit of adding national requirements to European law. Central Europe has good reason to sign first. A Polish report has catalogued 100 examples of gold-plating and over-regulation in Poland’s implementation of EU law, and the Fraser Institute’s new index ranks Poland last of the 27 member states for economic freedom. Georgia and Armenia, both former Soviet republics, are ahead of most of the Union’s post-communist members. If they ever join, will they keep that lead?
Russian has a catchphrase, still familiar across the former Soviet Union, that is usually traced to a satirical song written by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach in the early 1930s: “Without a bit of paper you’re a bug; with a bit of paper you’re a person.” The principle behind the joke, that the citizen must prove and the official must certify, outlived the Soviet Union and the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. The Czech jurist Zdeněk Kühn has written about the “socialist textual positivism” of communist-era courts and asked how much of it survived 1989.
After 1989 the region rewrote its laws twice. The first time was to build market economies. The second came in the years before the 2004 enlargement, when candidates had to take over tens of thousands of pages of EU law and Brussels assessed their progress chapter by chapter. Administrations learned to treat a directive as an examination. Anxious candidates tend to write more than the question asks.
The letter of October 12
Von der Leyen proposed the pact in her State of the Union address on September 16, telling MEPs that “it is time for the member states to step up”. In her letter to EU leaders she wrote that a rule agreed at European level should not become more complex when it is transposed or implemented at national level. Governments that sign would declare and justify each requirement they add to EU law, and a review-and-removal process within the European Semester would target national rules that obstruct the single market.
She asked leaders to begin work on the pact at their summit on October 15-16, with a declaration to be signed before the end of the year. The summit’s conclusions called on the Commission to bring forward further initiatives to avoid gold-plating. They did not mention the pact.
Gold-plating is not a post-communist speciality. When the Commission asked businesses for examples over the summer, the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry sent 20, from the appointment of data-protection officers to declarations under packaging law.
Made in Poland
In February 2025 Rafał Brzoska, the founder of the parcel-locker company InPost, launched a deregulation drive called SprawdzaMY at the invitation of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. A report prepared for the initiative by lawyers at the DZP law firm, published in May 2025, listed 100 examples of gold-plating in sectors from banking and public procurement to telecoms and transport. In each of them, Polish legislators had widened the scope, tightened the rules or gone further than implementing EU law required. The authors called for unjustified additions to be removed and new ones to be identified before bills become law.
The EU’s DAC6 directive requires intermediaries, and in some cases taxpayers, to report potentially aggressive cross-border tax arrangements, with reporting due from July 2020. Poland applied its own rules from January 1, 2019, a year and a half earlier, and extended them to domestic arrangements, with penalties that could run into tens of millions of złoty. The domestic obligation ended on October 1 this year, under an amendment to the tax ordinance published in June.
Poland was early with DAC6 but is late with much else. According to the Commission’s Single Market Scoreboard, it had 21 single market directives overdue for transposition at the end of November 2025, and it was one of nine member states with high deficits both in transposing EU law on time and in transposing it correctly.
Grant Thornton counted 12,400 pages of new Polish legislation in 2025, 12 per cent fewer than in 2024 and the fewest in 19 years. By the end of 2025, 11 laws based on the initiative’s proposals had been passed and signed.
Estonia 15th, Poland 65th
The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World report, published on October 6 with data for 2024, shows how widely the EU’s post-communist members differ. Estonia is 15th of 165 countries and territories, Lithuania 22nd, Czechia 23rd and Latvia 29th. Then come Slovakia at 43rd, Hungary 49th, Romania 51st, Bulgaria and Slovenia joint 54th, Croatia 64th and Poland 65th, the lowest of the 27 member states. Germany is 19th.
On regulation, which in Fraser’s method covers credit and labour markets as well as the burden on business, Estonia is 11th, Germany 23rd and Poland 58th. Slovakia is 90th, Romania 96th and Croatia 107th.
Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia were part of the Soviet Union itself, which Poland never was. All three are in the top 30, ahead of every other post-communist member state except Czechia. Mart Laar, who became Estonia’s prime minister in 1992 at the age of 32, later explained his government’s radical start with some modesty: “I had read only one book on economics–Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose.” He had assumed that its proposals were already common practice in the West.
Tbilisi and Yerevan
Georgia and Armenia were Soviet republics too. Georgia is 26th in the Fraser ranking, behind only Estonia, Lithuania and Czechia among the EU’s post-communist members, and 19th on regulation, four places ahead of Germany. Armenia is 38th overall, ahead of every post-communist member state except the three Baltic states and Czechia, although its regulation ranking is weaker, at 101st. The Heritage Foundation’s 2026 index, which uses a different method, also puts Georgia ahead of Poland and Armenia slightly behind it.
After the Rose Revolution, under Kakha Bendukidze, minister for the economy and then for reform coordination between 2004 and 2008, Georgia abolished more than four-fifths of its licences and permits. Its association agreement with the EU, which includes a deep and comprehensive free trade area, has applied since 2014, provisionally at first. Since then, Georgia has been bringing large parts of its economic law into line with the EU’s. A decade of alignment has not pushed it out of the world’s top 30. The EU considers the accession process de facto halted, and the government in Tbilisi has said it will not seek to open negotiations before 2028.
Armenia’s agreement with the EU, in force since 2021, is narrower and contains no free trade area of that kind. In August Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Yerevan would soon begin the process of applying for membership. Armenia also belongs to the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, and Pashinyan has acknowledged that it cannot be a member of both.
The same rulebook
Tallinn and Warsaw took over the same rulebook in 2004. Today they stand 50 places apart in the Fraser ranking.
The Commission is simplifying its own legislation too: it has proposed a dozen “omnibus” packages, and it now says it will favour exhaustive regulations, which apply directly, over directives in single market matters where the law allows. That would narrow the space for gold-plating without closing it, because national administrations still license, inspect and design their own procedures.
Slovakia already asks for something like the pact. A Slovak bill transposing an EU directive must come with a table comparing it with the directive, and any gold-plating has to be identified and justified there. Other Central European governments could publish, with every such bill, a list of the national additions and the reasons for each. It is one piece of EU policy the region could safely gold-plate.
For Georgia and Armenia, membership is years away. When it comes, Brussels will send the directives either way. Whether entrepreneurs in Tbilisi and Yerevan also get the extra stamps will be decided at home, as it was in Warsaw.
Photo: Dreamstime.
Brussels writes the rules, Central Europe adds the paperwork was originally published on Emerging Europe.
