KYIV, October 28, 2015 – A new World Bank Group report finds that, despite a challenging macroeconomic and political environment, Ukraine has continued to improve the regulatory framework for entrepreneurs over the past year. Factoring in this year’s report expansion of several indicator sets, Ukraine’s Ease of Doing Business ranking improved to 83rd, four spots up from last year.
Doing Business 2016: Measuring Regulatory Quality and Efficiency, finds that Ukraine made progress in the area of Starting a Business, where it ranks 30th out of 189 economies - compared to the 70th in the previous year. In this area, Ukraine reduced the time required for value-added tax registration and eliminated business registration fees. As a result, the time to start a business has continued to decline. In 2004, it took an entrepreneur in Kiev 40 days to incorporate compared to 7 days today - the same as in Sweden.
“It is encouraging to see that the Ukrainian government continues to take steps to make doing business easier in the country,” said Qimiao Fan, World Bank Director for Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. “At the same time this is only a start. More and faster work is required to further improve the broad business environment. We are ready to continue helping the authorities accelerate reforms and make Ukraine a better place for entrepreneurs.”
Aivaras Abromavičius, Ukraine’s Minister of Economic Development and Trade, said: “Our task is to do everything we can so that Ukraine becomes a TOP-50 country with the most favorable business environment just in two years”.
At the indicator level, Ukraine records some of the best practices in Getting Credit (indicator rank of 19), thanks in part to a credit bureau that covers a large share of the population and collects most of the relevant areas of information to assess credit-worthiness. There is room for improvement, however, in several areas such as Resolving Insolvency (141), Dealing with Construction Permits (140) and Protecting Minority Investors (88).
This year’s Doing Business report completes a two-year effort to expand benchmarks that measure the quality of regulation, as well as the efficiency of the business regulatory framework, in order to better reflect the reality of business operations on the ground. In this report, five indicators saw changes that impacted the ranking of Ukraine – Dealing with Construction Permits, Getting Electricity, Enforcing Contracts, Registering Property and Trading Across Borders.
The report finds that the Europe and Central Asia region recorded significant progress with over 90 percent of economies implementing reforms to improve their business climate during the past year. FYR Macedonia is the region’s highest ranking economy, with a global ranking of 12 out of 189 economies from around the world. Lithuania and Latvia are the second and third-highest ranking economies in the region, at 20 and 22, respectively.
The full report and accompanying datasets are available at https://www.doingbusiness.org/
