New Zealand is the easiest country to do business in
September 10, 2004
Washington - New Zealand ranked at the top of a list of 145 countries for ease of doing business in 2004, while Slovakia and Colombia made the most improvement, a World Bank survey showed this week.
Botswana was the highest-ranked African nation, coming in among the top 20.
New Zealand, the US, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia were the top five in the survey, which indicated that wealthy countries undertook three times as many investment climate reforms as poor countries last year, portending a potentially wider gap between rich and poor nations.
"Poor countries that desperately need new enterprises and jobs risk falling even further behind rich ones that are simplifying regulation and making their investment climates more business friendly," said Michael Klein, World Bank vice-president for private sector development.
The report showed that, on average, it took a business in a rich nation six procedures, 8 percent of income per capita and 27 days to get started. In a poor or lower-middle-income economy, the same process took 11 procedures, 122 percent of income per capita and 59 days.
European nations were especially active in enacting reforms to help businesses, the report showed. The top 10 reformers for the most recent year were Slovakia, Colombia, Belgium, Finland, India, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
The report focused on five sets of business environment indicators: starting a business, hiring and firing workers, enforcing contracts, getting credit and closing a business.
After the top five, the others in the top 20 economies were Norway, Britain, Canada, Sweden, Japan, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, Lithuania, Slovakia, Botswana and Thailand.
Sixteen of the 20 countries with the most cumbersome business regulations and weakest protection of property rights were in Africa, the report said.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Burkina Faso and Chad rank in the bottom five.
"It takes two days to start a business in Australia, but 203 days in Haiti and 215 days in the Democratic Republic of Congo," the report said. "There are no monetary costs to start a business in Denmark, but it costs more than five times income per capita in Cambodia and over 13 times in Sierra Leone."
The report suggested that weak property rights and heavy business regulation excluded the poor from joining the formal economy.
"Heavy regulation not only fails to protect women, young people and the poor - those it was intended to serve - but often harms them," said Caralee McLiesh, an author of the report.
The study showed that countries relying on common-law traditions from the English tradition regulate the least, while those in the French civil law tradition regulate the most.
|
|
