by Thorsten Koch

The Federal Association of German Industry (BDI) has spoken out in favor of reducing state bureaucracy to a large extent in order to get the economy up and running in the wake of the corona pandemic. Bureaucracy is a disadvantage for Germany as an economic location, and inhibits innovation.

Among other things, the association is committed to investments from abroad. The Federal Government has recently tightened the foreign trade regulation once again, for example due regarding the need to report the fact that companies from non-EU countries may want to acquire more than 10 percent of German pharmaceutical and medical goods manufacturers.

In the energy sector, an existing relief policy from network charges is to be retained – even if companies use less energy during the Corona crisis, said BDI President Dieter Kempf.

The association also advocates advances in digitization: “Certified electronic signatures should be adopted by authorities instead of manual signatures”, and administrations should “get going” more quickly and comprehensively, as a spokesman for the association said.

Finally, the economy wants access to patient health data, in order to pass this data on to a state institute, for research purposes. This should put data protectionists on alert, but might be supported by crucial instances during times of Corona.