Wednesday 1 May 2013

Doing Business Report 2013

Posted by Admin

The Doing Business Project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 185 economies and selected cities at the sub-national and regional level.

The Doing Business Project, launched in 2002, looks at domestic small and medium-size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle.

By gathering and analyzing comprehensive quantitative data to compare business regulation environments across economies and over time, Doing Business encourages countries to compete towards more efficient regulation; offers measurable benchmarks for reform; and serves as a resource for academics, journalists, private sector researchers and others interested in the business climate of each country.

In addition, Doing Business offers detailed sub-national reports, which exhaustively cover business regulation and reform in different cities and regions within a nation. These reports provide data on the ease of doing business, rank each location, and recommend reforms to improve performance in each of the indicator areas. Selected cities can compare their business regulations with other cities in the country or region and with the 185 economies that Doing Business has ranked.

The first Doing Business report, published in 2003, covered 5 indicator sets and 133 economies. This year’s report covers 11 indicator sets and 185 economies.

Doing Business captures several important dimensions of the regulatory environment as they apply to local firms. It provides quantitative measures of regulations for starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity,  registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading  across borders, enforcing contracts and  resolving insolvency. Doing Business also looks at regulations on employing workers. Pending further progress on research in this area, this year’s report does not present rankings of economies on the employing workers indicators or include the topic in the aggregate ranking on the ease of doing business. It does present the data on the employing workers indicators.

The economies that rank highest on the ease of doing business are not those where there is no regulation—but those where governments have managed to create rules that facilitate interactions in the marketplace without needlessly hindering the development of the private sector. In essence, Doing Business is about smart business regulations, not necessarily fewer regulations.

In constructing the indicators the Doing Business project uses 2 types of data. The first come from readings of laws and regulations in each economy

Key findings:

a) Singapore topped the global ranking on the ease of doing business for the seventh consecutive year, followed by Hong Kong SAR, China,; New Zealand; the United States; and Denmark.

b) Georgia was a new entrant to the top 10.

c) Poland was the global top improver in the past year. It enhanced the ease of doing business through four institutional or regulatory reforms, making it easier to register property, pay taxes, enforce contracts, and resolve insolvency.

d) Besides Poland, nine other economies are recognized as having the most improved ease of doing business across several areas of regulation as measured by the report: Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Burundi, Costa Rica, Mongolia, Greece, Serbia, and Kazakhstan.

e) The WB's report has ranked Sri Lanka at 81st, Maldives at 95th, Pakistan at 107th, Nepal 108th, India 132nd, Bangladesh 129th, Bhutan 148th and Afghanistan 168th in the 185 economies of the world.

f) Worldwide, 108 economies implemented 201 regulatory reforms in 2011/12 making it easier to do business as measured by Doing Business. Reform efforts globally have focused on making it easier to start a new business, increasing the efficiency of tax administration and facilitating trade across international borders. Of the 201 regulatory reforms recorded in the past year, 44% focused on these 3 policy areas alone. 

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