WASHINGTON, October 25, 2016 - The World Bank’s latest ease of doing business report finds that Chile continues to be a top performer in the Latin America and the Caribbean.
Along with Mexico, Colombia and Peru, Chile is among a small cluster of countries in the region that offer a favorable business climate, finds Doing Business 2017: Equal Opportunity for All, released today.
The report further finds that Chile is one of only six economies worldwide that gets the highest possible score on the shareholder rights index, thanks to a strong framework to protect shareholder’s rights and roles in major corporate decisions.
Chile also does well in in the Doing Business area of Getting Electricity. For example, it takes an entrepreneur 43 days to be connected to the grid in Santiago, compared to the regional average of 66 days. Moreover, the cost to register a property transfer is only about 1 percent of the value of the property, compared to the regional average of about 6 percent.
Chile performs best in the Doing Business area of Dealing with Construction Permits. For example, it only takes a business 152 days to obtain a permit to build a warehouse, which is one month less than the Latin America and Caribbean region average of 181 days.
Challenges remain in certain areas, such as Registering Property, Getting Credit, Trading Across Borders and Paying Taxes. For instance, it takes 291 hours a year (36 working days) for an entrepreneur to comply with tax filings in Chile, compared to an average of 163 annual hours (20 working days) in the OECD high-income region, of which Chile is a part.
This year, the report considers gender-related aspects in three Doing Business areas: Starting a Business, Registering Property and Enforcing Contracts. The findings reveal that in Chile married women do not have equal ownership rights to property as men.
The Paying Taxes indicator has been expanded to cover post-filing processes, such as tax audits and VAT refund. The new measures indicate space for improvement for Chile. For example, it takes 65 hours to comply with a corporate income tax audit in Chile, compared to the average time of 20 hours in Latin America and the Caribbean region. The drop in Chile’s performance in the Paying Taxes area is not related to the recent changes introduced by the tax reform, but methodological changes in Doing Business 2017, which includes the post-filling index. This index captures the compliance burden for businesses and efficiency of the post filling procedures, such as the VAT cash refund mechanism that, in the case of Chile, has been in place since 1985.
The full report and accompanying datasets are available at https://www.doingbusiness.org/
