Why Belgium?
Maybe you live here already or maybe Belgium represents a neutral location for your European headquarters or perhaps you are setting up a representation office to the EU. There are many advantages to setting up your operations in Belgium, including:
- the location of the EU institutions in Brussels
- a lot of official encouragement and support for start ups including grants, advice, subsidised office space, tax incentives for hiring staff etc
- efficient banking system
- excellent transport infrastructure locally, nationally and internationally
- specialised service providers for new business and new organisations
- a central location in Europe, often described as ‘neutral’
- a well educated and highly productive work force
- English is widely spoken to a high level
There are drawbacks though, because Belgium is complex for business. Here are the major ones, cited in order of frequency by the many small business owners we interviewed for this book:
- expensive to hire staff – social security costs are 35% of gross salary for starters, rising to 50% for manual workers (although this compares with neighbouring countries)
- very hard to let go of staff (although again, this is similar to neighbouring countries)
- the rules in relation to employment and social security are complex
- the tax system is complex and not transparent; headline rates of tax are high but there are so many deductions that the effective rate can be very low
- on a scale of 1 to 10, Belgium ranks around 7 for bureaucracy but whether you see this as an obstacle may depend on how you rank your home country
- not a service-orientated society, though starting to improve in some sectors
- labour market is tight in Flanders although this is not the case for Brussels or Wallonia, where labour continues to be plentiful
- very complex political environment and system of government
