Expert opinion: Saltanat Akhmetzhanova

The President's Address defines seven main principles of the new economic course, including the principle of "making informed decisions by the state and responsibility for them to society". Implementation of this principle will allow to improve the legislative framework of public administration.

New approach to economic decision-making reinforces the importance of assessing the socio-economic consequences of adopted draft laws, which is currently being carried out by policy makers from among the state bodies and aimed at identifying unjustified costs to the state, population and business. This approach involves an objective and comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of legal norms, good coordination of relevant government agencies and accounting of interests of all target groups involved (state, population, business) that will allow to make decisions that are understandable to business and population, and to get the most out of budget expenses. As a result of the assessment, the problem of excessive legislative regulation of the activities of executive authorities should also be solved.

Currently, in Kazakhstan, part of the policy-making process is carried out manually on paper, which indicates one of the main problems of policy-making - the lack of a unified legal system that allows automating the above-mentioned process.

In his Message, the Head of State noted the need to continue the basic element of all reforms – the digitalization process, i.e. ensuring a unified database system.

In 2019, the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Kazakhstan jointly with other state bodies developed E-legislation system, provided for in the Action Plan on implementation of Digital Kazakhstan state program.

This system will significantly simplify the work of state bodies by way of automating the process of preparation, public discussion, coordination, approval and publication of regulatory legal acts, will reduce time spent on preparation of draft laws, and will make it possible to better assess the needs of legislation from the point of view of different groups of consumers.

Automation of the legislative process is widely used in foreign countries. For example, Germany has an efficient IT infrastructure that allows for a smooth digital legislative process from the preliminary proposal to the final draft. Thus, the eZeitplanung project allows for collective work on legislative projects between the legislative bodies and the ministries involved. In addition, Germany has implemented an online application that facilitates the preliminary calculation of statutory compliance costs, allows Federal Ministries to collect data on individual provisions of the new regulatory initiative in a structured form, enter the data necessary to determine statutory compliance efforts, and perform the corresponding calculations.

There is a Regulations.gov website in the United States, which is an electronic policy-making initiative that was launched to provide public users with access to federal regulatory content. This portal contains electronic versions of proposed and final regulations, as well as other normative documents and notifications from the Federal Register.

In general, the President set systemic tasks for development of public administration, national economy, strategic sectors, regions, reform of law enforcement and judicial systems, and improvement of social well-being. Relevant laws will be adopted to implement all the President's initiatives, including the Law on Industrial Policy, Social Code, and Environmental Code.