Ease Of Doing Business: World Bank Ranks Nigeria 170th - Business -

The reforms effort of the immediate past administration of President
Goodluck Jonathan may have yielded some dividend as Nigeria moved up
five places in the latest ranking by the World Bank Group on the ease of
doing business.

The World Bank ranked Nigeria 170th
among 189 countries survey, this shows an improvement of 2.9 per cent on
the 175 position it occupied last year.

Also, Nigeria was ranked
129 on the ease of starting a business (138 last year), on dealing with
construction permits it was ranked 171 as against 168 last year. 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 125 in 2014 to 52nd position in the current ranking.
Nigeria
fell by one basis 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 179 as against 177 in 2014.

The
report showed that Singapore was the best country in the world to do
business, while Mauritius remained the best in Africa with a ranking of
28.
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.

Tagged,
“Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency,” the report revealed
that entrepreneurs in 123 economies saw improvements in their local
regulatory framework last year.

Between June 2013 and June 2014,
the report, which measures 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 annual 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 bench marked to
June 2014,” it added.

[ThisDay]