Doing Business Report

News:The World Bank has released its doing business report 2020.

Facts:

About Doing Business Report:

• Doing Business report measures regulations across the 190 economies in 12 business regulatory areas to assess the business environment in each economy.
• The ten of these indicators were used to estimate an ease of doing business score this year.
• The 10 parameters are- starting a business, construction permits, getting electricity, getting credit, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and resolving insolvency.
• The other two indicators are employing workers and contracting with the government which were not included in the ease of doing business score and ranking.
• The rankings are on the basis of Distance to Frontier (DTF), a score that shows the gap of an economy to the global best practice.

Key takeaways from the report:

• New Zealand has topped the rankings followed by Singapore and Hong Kong.
• The 10 economies that improved the most in their ease of doing business score were Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Togo, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, China, India, and Nigeria.

Report on India:

• India has recorded a jump of 14 positions at 63rd rank against its rank of 77 last year.
• For the third consecutive year, India was also amongst the top 10 improvers.
• India’s improved ranking was on the back of reforms such as (a)dealing with construction permits (b)trading across borders and (c)resolving insolvency.
• The Indian Imports and exports also became easier with a single electronic platform for trade stakeholders, among other things.
• India also saw the biggest jump in ranking in resolving insolvency category to 52nd rank from 108th.
• However,the country still lags in areas like enforcing contracts and registering property.
• The report has said that India takes 58 days and costs on average 7.8 percent of a property’s value to register it,longer and at greater cost than among OECD high-income economies.
• Further,it takes 1,445 days for a company to resolve a commercial dispute through a local first-instance court which is almost three times the average time in OECD high-income economies.