The Man Who Remade Georgia
Bendukidze cut income and payroll taxes and abolished other taxes, customs tariffs, and nearly eight hundred government licenses and permits. “Each government permit was a corruption tool that allowed the state to take bribes,” Fady Asly, the chairman of Georgia’s International Chamber of Commerce, said. “Kakha just eradicated that whole system.”
.. The result, his allies point out, was astonishing. By 2005, Georgia’s budget had tripled—largely because taxes, though lower, were being collected—and its G.D.P. was growing by ten per cent each year. By 2009, the country had climbed from a hundred and forty-seventh to eleventh place in the World Bank’s “ease of doing business” index.
.. Bendukidze urged Ukrainians to stop blaming others for their problems. “You have broken every world record in idiocy,” he told an audience at the Kyiv School of Economics, in July. “You keep electing populists, people who promise you more. This means you are electing the worst.” He advocated cutting government spending, reducing retirement benefits for public servants, and radically deregulating the economy. Ukraine, he said, in one of his last interviews, had too many ministries and agencies. ”Who needs them when the government’s sole function these days is to take money from the International Monetary Fund and pass it on in payment for Russian gas?” he asked.