RETAIL RESTRICTIVENESS ANALYSIS IN EASTERN EUROPE RETAIL RESTRICTIVENESS ANALYSIS IN EASTERN EUROPE | Page 3

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
SITUATION
In recent years, the European Commission has called attention to the excessive level of the retail regulation
in the Member States by initiating the studies of the retail regulation across the EU. At the legislative level,
it has advocated setting out best practices for facilitating retail establishment and reducing operational
restrictions in the Single Market. However, the studies and measures were solely focused on the EU, and
other European countries were not analysed.
As compared to the prior researches, the current study aims to update the analysis and extend its scope
to the Emerging Europe countries.
APPROACH
The study is based on the methodology used by the European Commission in the paper “A European retail
sector fit for the 21st century “. For the purpose of extending the scope to the Emerging Europe countries,
the methodology has been supplemented with additional sub-indicators. The updated RRI acts as a basis
of the methodology. It is leveraged to demonstrate the various levels of restrictiveness for different
regulatory aspects. The indicator serves as a practical tool for shedding light on how the level of retail
regulations in a given country is compared to the counterparts.
The RRI consists of 9 indicators related to a retail establishment (the establishment pillar) and 8 indicators
related to retail operations and antitrust laws (operational pillar). As presented in the figure below, each
pillar is composed of the appropriate indicators. The weights are evenly distributed.
The retail regulation benchmark focuses on several European countries. First of all, Eastern Europe
countries with a strong presence of CIVITTA (notably, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Moldova,
Serbia) have been included in the analysis. Besides, for the sake of comparison, a group of flagship EU
countries with the highly restrictive retail sector 1 (Spain, Italy and Germany) was included in the study.
RESULTS
Our study has revealed that Belarus, Italy and Russia have the most severe restrictions for establishment
and operations of retailers.
FIGURE 1: OVERVIEW OF RETAIL RESTRICTIVENESS INDEX BY COUNTRIES
Source: Civitta analysis, 2019
1
According to the study conducted by the European Commission “A European retail sector fit for the 21st century”
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