T he World Bank has ranked Nigeria 170th among 189 countries in a survey on how easy to do business. It shows an improvement of 2.9 per cent on the 175th position the country occupied last year.
Tagged: Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency, report revealed that entrepreneurs in 123 economies saw improvements in their local regulatory framework last year.
Also, Nigeria was ranked 129th on the ease of starting a business as against 138th last year, while it was ranked 171th on dealing with construction permits, as against 168th. On registering property, it remained 185th as it was the previous year.
The country, however, improved immensely on access to credit ranking as it moved from 125th last year to 52nd position in the current ranking.
Nigeria fell by one point on protecting minority investors’ ranking as it moved from the 61st position last year to the 62nd position this year. On paying taxes, Nigeria was ranked 179th as against 177 last year.
The report showed Singapore as the best country to do business, while Mauritius remained the best in Africa with a ranking of 28th.
New Zealand emerged second followed by Hong Kong. Denmark, Norway, United States, United Kingdom Finland and Austria were ranked the top 10 countries.
Haiti, Angola, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Congo DR, Chad South Sudan, Central African Republic, Libya and Eritrea were ranked the top 10 worst places to do business on the planet.
Between June 2013 and June, last year, the report, which measured 189 economies worldwide, documented 230 business reforms, with 145 reforms aimed at reducing the complexity and cost of complying with business regulation, and 85 reforms aimed at strengthening legal institutions – with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for the largest number of such reforms.
The yearly World Bank Group Doing Business report analyses regulations that apply to an economy’s businesses during their life cycle, including start-up and operations, trading across borders, paying taxes, and resolving insolvency.
The aggregate ease of doing business rankings are based on the distance to frontier scores for 10 topics and covers 189 economies.
The Word Bank said the distance to frontier score aids in assessing the absolute level of regulatory performance and how it improves over time.
“This measure shows the distance of each economy to the “frontier,” which represents the best performance observed on each of the indicators across all economies in the Doing Business sample since 2005. This allows users both to see the gap between a particular economy’s performance and the best performance at any point in time and to assess the absolute change in the economy’s regulatory environment over time as measured by doing business.
Economies, it added, were ranked on their ease of doing business, from 1–189, adding that a high ease of doing business ranking means the regulatory environment is more conducive for starting and operating local firms.
“The rankings are determined by sorting the aggregate distance to frontier scores on 10 topics, each consisting of several indicators, giving equal weight to each topic. The rankings for all economies are benchmarked to June 2014,” it added.