Armenia betters business regulations but ranks lower than last year

PanARMENIAN.Net - Armenia ranks 47 on the ease of doing business index against the 38 spot last year, the 15th anniversary edition of the World Bank Group’s annual Doing Business report revealed.

Meanwhile, Georgia ranks the 9th, while Azerbaijan follows in the 57th position.

Released on Tuesday, October 31, Doing Business 2018: Reforming to Create Jobs records 44 reforms in the region in the past year, bringing to a total of 673 the number of reforms enacted over the past 15 years.

The main reasons behind this change with respect to previously published rankings are: significant improvements in other economies’ business regulatory environments, methodology refinements and data revisions.

“On the distance to frontier metric - which assesses a country’s absolute level of regulatory performance on a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 represents the lowest performance and 100 represents the frontier - Armenia’s score went from 71.92 in Doing Business 2017 to 72.51 in Doing Business 2018,” said Sylvie Bossoutrot, WB Country Manager for Armenia.

“This means that over the course of last year Armenia improved its business regulations as captured by the Doing Business indicators in absolute terms. The country is indeed continuing to narrow the gap with the global regulatory frontier which is a positive development.”

More specifically, Doing Business finds that Armenia implemented substantive changes in the local regulatory framework in the following areas in 2016/17:

• Armenia made getting electricity easier by imposing new deadlines for connection procedures and introducing a new geographic information system at the utility;

• Armenia made registering property easier by improving the land administration system’s dispute resolution mechanisms.

Economies in Europe and Central Asia continued an active program of reforms to improve their business climate, to create jobs and spur growth, the report said.

Two of the region’s economies, Kosovo and Uzbekistan, feature among this year’s global top improvers and 13 of the region’s 24 economies are ranked in the top 50 in the Doing Business global rankings.