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The rules are killing me!” exclaims Tamer Akgün, sitting in his sandwich bar in the western part of Amsterdam. It has been two years since the Dutch entrepreneur of Turkish descent first decided to start a sandwich bar, and he has been largely unsuccessful. Although the shop is beautifully furnished, well equipped, and otherwise ready to welcome customers, the doors remain closed. Akgün has been forced to pay rent to his landlord while awaiting official permission to open his business, draining his bank accounts dry as he obtained the required licenses. As he sips his coffee while sitting amid his paperwork, Akgün makes no effort to conceal his frustration with the endless red tape, commenting, “I had to deal with ten, fifteen, maybe twenty different agencies. I stopped counting . I think I know more about the rules now than the government itself. They don’t know their own rules, but they have the power. It is very complicated.”1 The Economic Perspective: Removing Hurdles to Starting a Business The governments of the European Union member countries, united in their commitment to the Lisbon Strategy, have placed entrepreneurship high on their agendas as they recover from recession but continue to lag behind other parts of the 95 4 Economic Entitlements: Facilitating Immigrant Entrepreneurship jorrit de jong and peter kasbergen “ 1. Extract from a teaching case based on research in Huijboom and de Jong (2005). 04-7501-1 CH 4 10/28/08 5:21 PM Page 95 world in productivity growth (European Commission 2003).2 In keeping with this larger change, in recent years Dutch federal and local governments have recognized the vital importance of removing hurdles to starting a business (Cabinet of the Netherlands 2002, 2003, 2007). Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende (2006) stated in 2006: Entrepreneurship is fully exploited in an open, tolerant society in which people know how to contact and approach each other. . . . It’s not government ’s task to solve all problems; its task is to create room and possibilities for people with plans and ambitions. That is what this administration is working on. Reducing the number of rules and [the] administrative burden for entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and paying attention to education and innovation. This policy works. . . . Dutch entrepreneurs—among whom there are 60,000 entrepreneurs with a non-Western background—can face the future with confidence again. Most efforts to keep political promises to the private sector have led to quantitative results. For example, the Dutch government prides itself on a reduction of the average administrative burden for private firms of almost 20 percent (Ministries of Finance and Economic Affairs 2007). The government has established institutions to monitor the reduction of administrative burdens (for example, ACTAL and IPAL), and these and similar reforms have led to higher rankings by the World Bank (2006).3 The state has been particularly enthusiastic about supplying information and assistance to potential and startup entrepreneurs—businesspeople in respectively the pre-startup or startup phase of their planning. All levels of the Dutch government, local Chambers of Commerce, and semipublic intermediary organizations have created websites and organized seminars, training sessions, and trade fairs to reach these nascent and startup entrepreneurs. Given all these measures and assistance, why is the Turkish-Dutch sandwich bar owner having so many problems? In light of the political intentions and efforts just described, his case raises questions. If it is even slightly representative of the problems that entrepreneurs encounter, the reality differs significantly from the one that the prime minister painted, and the sandwich bar owner can scarcely face the future with confidence. How can his case be explained? If we look for answers in government reports on Dutch entrepreneurship, it is clear that the majority of entrepreneurs remain very far from praising the Dutch government for its regulatory policies. Several major representative bodies of large, medium-size, and small enterprises have claimed that the situation over the 96 jorrit de jong and peter kasbergen 2. The Lisbon Strategy is a strategy, set out by the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000, aimed at “making the European Union the most competitive economy in the world and achieving full employment by 2010.” Available at http://europa.eu/scadplus/glossary/lisbon_strategy_en.htm. 3. ACTAL stands for Advisory Board on Administrative Burdens to the Dutch Government; IPAL stands for the Interdepartmental Division Responsible for the Alleviation of Administrative Burdens. 04-7501-1 CH 4 10/28/08 5:21 PM Page 96 [18.191...

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