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Environmental regulations bring social benefits and contribute to lessening environmental damage. At the same time, due to the rapidly changing and complex environmental legislation, businesses incur costs, including administrative burdens. The article presents quantitative evidence on the factors that affect the compliance costs of environmental regulations. For this purpose, we used a binary model of logistic regression with the following predictors: enterprise characteristics, the relevance of environmental regulations for business operations, and the impact of environmental stimulus measures on compliance costs. The results of the study suggest that medium-sized enterprises are less likely to experience the environmental administrative burden than small enterprises. However, no difference has been found between large and small enterprises. Further, we show that environmental consents are an important determinant of the environmental administrative burden and that financial environmental measures can have a positive impact thereon.

The article reviews gender budgeting in Slovenia. It explains the development of gender budgeting in the country, as well as future trends. The review provides a useful tool for policy-makers and other decision-makers who are dealing with gender inequality issues. Accordingly, the article tries to pay more attention to the practical aspects of the social lives of both sexes and identify the inherent national causes of the current situation and gender inequality because gender budgeting is simply a reflection of a country's social climate.

Eliminating administrative burdens or ‘cutting red tape’ is becoming a political priority in most developed countries. The main problem faced by business and individuals is that, over the past two decades, the regulations they deal with have become more complex, and the related procedures place a financial burden on both business and individuals. This article presents the results of the first comprehensive quality assessment of public institutions and regulations in the fields of tax, environment and employment in Slovenia. Business managers assessed the quality of institutions and regulations in all three areas and their impact on their operations. The research indicates that Slovenian businesses gave the lowest score to environment protection institutions, with environmental protection regulations also scoring poorly. The scores were also low compared to most OECD countries. Points for practitioners The transition process in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Slovenia, is coming to an end. In spite of several efforts to adapt regulations and competent institutions to the higher EU standards, they still remain rigid. In this article, the results of the lastest survey of administrative quality of regulations and institutions in Slovenia with international comparison are presented. As for instructions for improvements in practice, they should above all focus on simplifying the regulations and making them more transparent.