RIGA, October 25, 2016 – Improved access to credit information and reforms to make paying taxes less complicated helped Latvia join the 20 economies with the top scores in the Doing Business 2017 ranking, says the World Bank Group’s report, released on Tuesday.
This year, Latvia ranks at 14th place, compared to 22nd in last year’s report. However, this rank is not comparable to the one published in the Doing Business 2016 report because of changes in the methodology. On a comparable metric with all adjustments made to the Doing Business 2016 data, last year’s ranking would have been 17. This still means an improvement on a year-on-year basis by three positions.
“The most recent report indicates Latvia’s score went up from 79.14 in Doing Business 2016 to 80.61 in Doing Business 2017, using a comparable methodology. This means that in the last year Latvia has improved its business regulations as captured by the Doing Business indicators in absolute terms - the country is narrowing the gap with best global practices,” said Maciej Drozd, an Economist at the World Bank.
Doing Business 2017 finds that Latvia implemented substantive improvements in the local regulatory framework in the following areas:
- Better access to credit information by launching a private credit bureau,
- Making paying taxes less complicated by improving its online systems for filing corporate income tax returns and mandatory labor contributions.
The annual World Bank Group flagship Doing Business report analyzes regulations that apply to an economy’s businesses during their life cycle, including start-up and operations, such as 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 cover 190 economies. This year’s report marks the 14th edition of the global Doing Business report series. For more information about the Doing Business reports, please visit doingbusiness.org
