East Asia and Pacific Makes Steady Progress to
Improve Business Environment: Doing Business Report
NAY PYI TAW, October 26, 2016 – Myanmar has improved its business regulatory environment over the past year through reforms on business registration and the enactment of a law that allows the establishment of a new credit bureau, finds the World Bank Group’s annual Doing Business report.
Doing Business 2017: Equal Opportunity for All, released today, finds that over two-thirds of East Asia and the Pacific region’s 25 economies implemented 45 reforms in the past year to make it easier to do business, compared to 28 reforms in the previous year.
Four economies in the East Asia and Pacific region rank among the top 10 economies globally in the Doing Business rankings. The top-ranked economies are New Zealand (at 1), followed by Singapore (2), Hong Kong SAR, China (4) and the Republic of Korea (5).
Myanmar now ranks at 170 among 190 economies on the ease of doing business, compared to 171 last year. When compared with leading economies, Myanmar has narrowed the gap with best practices, as reflected in the increase in the distance to frontier score from 44.01 to 44.56 over the past year. More specifically, Myanmar made starting a business easier by reducing the cost to register a company. It also simplified the process by removing the requirement to submit a reference letter and a criminal history certificate in order to incorporate a company. Myanmar also improved its credit information system by enacting a law that allows the establishment of a new credit bureau. However, the report also noted that Myanmar made trading across borders more difficult for traders as they experience higher costs and time delays due to congestion at the port of Yangon.
“Myanmar is steadily making progress in creating a business environment that will help the country sustain its strong pace of growth,” said World Bank Country Manager for Myanmar Abdoulaye Seck. “Pursuing business reforms will help the country create a vibrant private-sector and eventually, more jobs and better income for the people of Myanmar.”
Myanmar has the potential to follow the same path of inclusive growth as other high performing countries in the region, with a real opportunity to ensure that reforms benefit more people across geographical areas, ethnic communities and income groups. Sustaining a strong pace of growth through a diversified economy is critical to achieve this with policies that can enable a structural shift to more productive and labor intensive activities.
In East Asia and the Pacific, notably, two economies – Brunei Darussalam and Indonesia – are among this year’s top 10 improvers in the world.
Indonesia, which implemented seven reforms during the past year, made Starting a Business easier by abolishing the minimum capital requirement for small and medium-size enterprises and by encouraging the use of an online system to reserve company names. As a result, it now takes 22 days to start a business in Jakarta, compared with 46.5 days previously.
Brunei Darussalam, which implemented six reforms in the past year, increased the reliability of power supply by introducing an automatic energy management system for the monitoring of outages and the restoration of service. Additionally, the utility made getting electricity faster for businesses by streamlining the processes of reviewing applications As a result, a business can get connected to the grid in 35 days, compared to 56 days previously.
And Vanuatu, which undertook four reforms, made starting a business easier by removing registration requirements and digitizing the company registry.
“New reforms across sectors in the East Asia and Pacific Region are the stepping stones to enhance business activity. A marked improvement from last year, economies in the region still have improvements to make in order to ease the business climate for local entrepreneurs,” said Rita Ramalho, Manager, Doing Business Report.
Challenges remain particularly in the areas of Starting a Business, Trading Across Borders and Enforcing Contracts. For example, it takes on average 57 hours to comply with border regulations for exports in the region, this is significantly longer than the average time of 12 hours it takes in OECD high-income economies.
This year, for the first time, Doing Business includes a gender dimension in three of the 10 topics covered: Starting a Business, Registering Property and Enforcing Contracts. The report finds that, in those areas, few East Asia and Pacific economies have gender barriers. No such barriers exist in Myanmar.
In addition, the Paying Taxes indicator has been expanded to cover post-filing processes, such as tax audits and VAT refund. Many East Asia and Pacific economies perform well in these areas. For instance, VAT refund compliance time take less than 5 hours in Singapore, and audit compliance time takes no longer than 2 hours in the Philippines
The full report and accompanying datasets are available at www.doingbusiness.org
