-: My name is Iyadh Abid,
and I am an advisor to the Minister of Development,
Investment, and International Corporation
in Tunis, Tunisia.
I would say my main mission is to work on how
to streamline and fluidify investment laws and regulations.
Essentially we are looking
at what's hindering and preventing
Tunisia's economic potential to boom,
and we're trying to work on these issues
trying to reduce bureaucracy, red tape,
encourage investment, foreign and domestic.
Because I am the lawyer of a team,
I tend to work with whoever needs any legal advice
or legal research, so I do some research.
My job entails that among other things.
But it's essentially being quick on your feet,
having some project management skills,
the ability to synthesize things quickly and smoothly,
but also have some social skills to work
in trust in confidence with the rest of the administration.
We worked on issuing a governmental decree
that started by eliminating a few business authorizations.
The idea was to reduce red tape, reduce everything
that's bureaucratic, make things smoother.
And that was in May 2018, and since then it actually
helped improve among other regulations we took,
it helped improve our Doing Business ranking.
Doing Business is a report issued by the World Bank.
It measures the ease of doing business in 190 countries.
We have been going down for the past six years.
Last year, after a series of about 50 regulations
that we changed, we went up eight places in the ranking.
We started working on, what we call now,
the transversal law.
Basically it works like a patch or an update for your phone
or your computer.
We are not trying to put in motion huge complicated reforms.
What we are trying to do is trying to identify,
we already did that in fact,
we identified some articles or flaws,
sometimes even a word in one single article
of a long law and just by tweaking it around,
moving a couple of words here and there,
we are able to create a huge impact.
Basically this is the process.
We have been testing the waters in this new ministry.
When we started in 2017,
we identified what we could do in terms of quick wins
and what would be more mid-term wins, let's say.
We worked on a decree.
Then we brought up the big guns who worked on a law.
That's basically how the process goes.
We consult with every intervening party or element
and then we create the end result.