How Bureaucracy Is Strangling Germany

For seven years, Germany’s economic output has stagnated, and one of the causes is rampant bureaucracy. There is hardly any country where entrepreneurs and citizens do not complain about bureaucracy, but in Germany, it has reached a new dimension. The renowned German ifo Institute estimates that Germany loses 146 billion euros in economic output every year due to excessive bureaucracy — the equivalent of about four percent of the gross domestic product. Companies have had to hire hundreds of thousands of employees (325,000 since 2022 alone) simply to comply with the countless bureaucratic regulations. In 2010, German federal legislation comprised around 25,000 pages; today it is almost 40,000. Every year, another 1,000 pages are added — and this does not even include the numerous EU regulations. These figures can be found in the excellent book by economist Daniel Stelter, “Absturz. So retten wir Deutschland” (“Crash: How We Save Germany”), which is currently generating considerable debate in Germany.

Promises to Reduce Bureaucracy — The Opposite Happens

For decades, every German government has declared in countless speeches how important it is to reduce bureaucracy. And exactly the opposite is happening. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen promised an “unprecedented” reduction of regulations in the EU, but the opposite occurred. In 2025, the European Commission........

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