A study published yesterday has placed the monetary price Malta has paid to adopt and transpose the tomes of European Union legislation at e417 million.

According to the results of a study published by Open Europe, the price of EU regulations overshadows the price paid for adopting domestic regulation, which, since Malta became an EU member in 2004, has cost the country just e163 million.

As such, the proportion of the cost of EU legislation as compared with domestic regulation, yesterday’s study found, was 72 per cent – the EU’s highest proportion and a figure the country shares with Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania and the UK.

The EU average proportion was of 65.7 per cent.

The cumulative cost of all legislation, both EU-derived and domestic, in Malta since 2004 was placed at e580 million.

The annual cost of legislation in Malta, the study found, stands at e112.2 million – e72.5 million of which is derived from EU regulations and e39.7 million of which stemmed from domestic legislation. That places Malta’s annual proportion of EU-related legislative costs at 64.6 per cent, again, a leading position it shares with eight other countries. The EU’s annual average proportion was of 57.8 per cent.

The study uses Open Europe’s Regulation Database, the World Bank’s Doing Business Rankings, DG Enterprise and Eurostat as its statistical sources.

Being a British eurosceptic NGO, the Open Europe study’s main focus was the cost of regulation introduced in the past decade in the UK in the 10 years since the British government introduced a system of Regulatory Impact Assessments in an effort to get a grip on the flow of new regulations.

The EU states with the lowest proportion of EU legislation costs were Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia – all with a proportion of 58.3 per cent.

The cumulative cost of regulation introduced between 1998 and 2008 for all 27 EU member states was gauged at e1.4 trillion, of which 66 per cent, or e928 billion, is EU-sourced. If current trends continue, the study notes, by 2018 the cost of EU regulation introduced since 1998 will have risen to more than e3.017 trillion – over e15,000 per EU household in the EU.