One of our priorities has been to get these countries integrated into the global marketplace as quickly as possible. Communism may have fallen in Europe and Eurasia, but in too many ways in too many places, the communist mentality has not. Confusing and contradictory laws make the legal hurdles to entrepreneurship seem almost worse than they used to be. To the average American these concerns may seem very distant. And a government with overly complex and burdensome laws and regulations invites official corruption, creating an environment where business is judged not by the quality of its product but by its ability to pay bribes.
Corruption takes a level playing field and tilts it toward the dishonest.
One of the first things we did, for example, was to help strengthen the rule of law in places like Georgia by helping ensure that only qualified judges assumed the bench. Today, as a result, Georgian attorneys report that the legal process is both freer and fairer. So these are some of the things we have been doing and will keep doing to help change the business climate in Europe and Eurasia over the next ten years. We all know that to operate, these businesses need not only resources and equipment and staff, but access to credit. In the former Soviet bloc, banks too often either don t know how to target the small business sector with their commercial loans or they simply don t want to.