I quite agree with that statement. I can talk about the French case since I'm French but I don't know about Germany. There is a lot of obstacles for a startup that you will have compared to other countries but I would not say that firing someone is one of them, it's just that you need a reason to fire someone, you can't just fire them like this. One of the main problem for me is the taxes which are ridiculously high but the most critical point in my opinion is the bureaucracy. The amount of paperwork is so high that you need to seek for advices all the time, the system is really really over-complex, it takes ages for the administration to process stuff, the bureaucracy is really killing the country. I still discover stuff every year I did not know about, if you never lived in a country like this, you have no idea how badly it can affect the economy.