The paradox is plain to see: everyone understands that the system of public administration needs radical restructuring, but doing so from within the system itself turns out to be practically impossible.
Numbers That Don't Lie
The World Bank's Government Effectiveness Index is one of the few cross-cutting indicators that allows comparison of governance quality over time. For Russia, it shows steady degradation: the latest recorded value, for 2023, stood at minus 0.71 points on a scale from minus 2.5 to plus 2.5, against a global average of minus 0.04. For comparison, Russia's best result over the entire observation period — plus 0.02 points — was recorded in 2019. In other words, the country is not merely falling behind the global average but moving in the opposite direction precisely at the moment when the technology race demands maximum speed in decision-making.
The domestic business climate is responding to this dynamic quite predictably. The RSPP Composite Business Environment Index spent the whole of 2025 in negative territory, below the 50-point threshold — in December the reading stood at 46.1 points, while the average deviation from the threshold widened from minus 1.5 points in 2024 to minus 3.8 points in 2025. RSPP economists have explicitly labeled 2025 "a year of stagnation," one in which companies rated each successive period as more difficult than the one before.
Regulatory Guillotine Versus the Runaway Printer
Formally, the mechanism was named with great promise — the "regulatory guillotine," launched back in 2019–2020 with the goal of mass-repealing outdated Soviet-era regulatory requirements. The World Bank did in fact record an improvement at the time: government effectiveness rose enough for Russia to overtake half the countries in the world, and the country received its first-ever positive assessment for the quality of its legislation. The problem is that the effect proved short-lived: by 2023 the effectiveness indicator had returned to its historical low of minus 0.71 points — meaning the entire effect of the guillotine had been fully wiped out by a new wave of regulation.
This is precisely the essence of the "runaway printer" paradox: the speed of repealing old barriers physically cannot keep pace with the speed at which new ones appear. The guillotine chops off one head of the bureaucratic hydra, only for two new ones to grow in its place — in the form of fresh subordinate legislation, industry regulations, and reporting requirements. The World Bank Institute was already documenting the systemic nature of this problem back in the mid-2000s: poor governance quality affects not only the investment climate but also, directly, citizens' quality of life — and this is a factor that cannot be solved through piecemeal reforms.
An Administrative Tax on Time
One of the most telling indicators is the share of business executives' working time spent on complying with regulatory requirements rather than developing their businesses. According to World Bank data, this indicator did decline in certain periods — from 22% in 2008 to 17% in 2011. But the decline turned out to be not a systemic trend but a one-off effect of specific measures that were never subsequently scaled up or institutionally consolidated.
The Bank of Russia's Business Climate Indicator shows the same volatility without any lasting improvement: in January 2025 it fell to 3.8 points from 4.3 points in December, while the construction sector slipped into negative territory altogether at minus 1.8 points. Technology-intensive and capital-intensive industries, which depend on long-term planning and regulatory predictability, react more painfully to this kind of instability than others — and it is precisely there that the gap with global leaders is widening fastest.
Why the System Cannot Be Changed From Within
The key paradox at issue here is explained by the basic logic of bureaucratic systems: any government body responsible for creating regulation is institutionally interested in preserving and expanding its own powers, not in curtailing them. The regulatory guillotine was designed as a tool external to the system, but its implementation was nonetheless entrusted to the very same agencies that had been creating those norms for decades. The result was a situation in which the fox guards the henhouse while simultaneously building a new fence around it — the volume of new regulatory acts outpaces the repeal of old ones faster than the ink can dry on the decree canceling the previous batch.
The only working historical precedent in which Russia's governance indicators actually improved at an accelerated pace was the country's climb in the Doing Business ranking, from 120th place in 2012 to 51st in 2016 — the best result among all BRICS countries. But even this success was narrow, measured by technical metrics of business registration alone, and did not touch the fundamental mechanisms of decision-making — hence the subsequent rollback in integral governance-effectiveness indicators.
The technology race of the 2020s is structured so that the winners are not the countries with the best engineers, but the countries with the ability to quickly turn engineering ideas into finished products without bureaucratic losses along the way. As long as the administrative system keeps reproducing itself faster than it can be reformed, the gap between the regulatory guillotine and the runaway printer will only keep growing — and along with it, the technological lag now being recorded not merely in expert opinion, but in the objective statistics of the World Bank and Russian business associations.
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