The government wanted to create an environment that would allow businesses and investments to thrive, said Louise Kanyonga, head of strategy and competitiveness at the Rwanda Development Board. According to the study, the top 10 places in the world to do business are New Zealand (with a score of 86.8 out of 100), Singapore (86.2), Hong Kong SAR, China (85.3), Denmark (85.3), Republic of Korea (84), United States (84), Georgia (83.7), United Kingdom (83.5), Norway (82.6) and Sweden (82). The first Doing Business report, published in 2003, included five groups of indicators and 133 economies. The final study, published in 2019, included 11 sets of indicators and 190 economies. The micro-entrepreneur benefits from a guarantee registry in Colombia, which allows companies to register movable assets such as machinery or even their own products as collateral. More than 1.3 million of these assets were registered between March 2014 and October 2016 to support lending from lenders, including some of the country`s largest banks. A quarter guaranteed loans to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. Regulations are in place to protect workers, public safety, businesses and investments. However, ineffective or inadequate regulation can stifle entrepreneurial activity and business growth and affect the ease of doing business. It takes more than 200 hours to meet the requirements of maritime export borders in Cameroon and Côte d`Ivoire. On the other hand, it only takes 10 hours in Singapore. The cost of border compliance for export to seaports in Gabon averages $1,600, but in Mauritius it is just over $300. The new project to promote an economic environment will not measure all the factors influencing an economy`s business environment.
These are complementary resources relevant to the business environment and not measured by the new project, such as public security and macroeconomic stability. Doing Business is now in its 17th year, and since its inception, 178 economies have implemented 722 business creation reforms to remove or eliminate barriers to entry. Despite these improvements, there are still significant differences between developed and developing countries in most Doing Business indicators. The small, landlocked African nation has become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with a rapidly urbanizing middle class. Kanyonga said private investment has increased by 60 percent in the past 8 years, and foreign direct investment alone has increased by nearly 40 percent. Colombia is one of many countries around the world reforming their trade regulations. © Pedro Szekely / Flickr via Creative Commons The World Bank Group is working on a new approach to assessing the business and investment climate. This section contains a compendium of existing business environment indicators that may be of interest to many users. The new approach to assessing the business environment aims to complement these existing indicators and fill gaps.
To simplify business registration, the government launched the first public service room in 2011 – a one-stop shop for government services. Today, 19 utility rooms process approvals for multiple agencies, with the option of online credit card payments. While many East Asian and Pacific economies are relatively easy to do business, the pace of reform has slowed compared to previous years. Reforms have been implemented in less than half of the economies (12 out of 25). Nevertheless, five East Asia and Pacific economies are among the top 25 performing countries in the world, including Singapore (2nd), Hong Kong SAR, China (3rd); Malaysia (12th); Taiwan, China (15th); and Thailand (21st). China jumped to 31st place in the rankings and is among the top 10 improvers for the second year in a row. The most popular reform is to make it easier to start a business. More than a quarter of economies did so in 2017/18.
It now takes an average of 20 days and costs 23 per cent of per capita income to start a business, up from 47 days and 76 per cent of per capita income in 2006. Thirteen of the top 20 economies have at least one procedure that can be completed online in half a day. By putting the perspective of a small national company at the center of its analysis, Doing Business was revolutionary, Solf said. The index measures reforms in 11 areas: business start-ups, building permit processing, electricity supply, real estate registration, loans, minority investor protection, tax payments, cross-border trade, contract enforcement, bankruptcy resolution and labour market regulation. A related project, Subnational Doing Business, was designed to capture differences in local trade regulations and their application between locations in the same economy. Since 2005, Subnational Doing Business has compared nearly 600 sites in more than 80 economies, including China, India, Mexico and Nigeria. “Governments have a huge task ahead of them to create an environment in which entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises can thrive,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. “Sound and effective business regulation is crucial to private sector entrepreneurship and prosperity. Without it, we have no chance of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity around the world. The results of Doing Business 2020 show that in almost every economy around the world, there is room to streamline or accelerate rules to make it easier to do business, allow entrepreneurship to flourish and allow economic activity to reach its full potential.
