Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan
Photo: AP
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Russian Business Climate Tops Nepal
The World Bank and International Finance Corp. published Doing Business 2009 today. It is a report on the quality of government regulations and its effect on business, especially small and medium-sized business in 181 countries. Azerbaijan is acknowledged as the world leader in reform. There was no large-scale reform noted in Russia in 2007-2008 and so the rating of its business climate, unlike that in most post-Soviet countries, continues to drop steadily.
The sixth annual report bases its rating on the costs of opening, operating and closing a business, construction permits, hiring labor, and other factors, ten in all. The indicators are maximally formal, to avoid expert opinion and macroeconomic indicators. It is the most authoritative rating of business climate available.
Azerbaijan showed improvement in 7 out of 10 indicators and rose 64 positions to rank 33rd in the world, close to the level of the United Arab Emirates, France and Israel. Singapore, New Zealand and the United States led the rating. The IFC noted that Eastern Europe and Central Asia were the most active regions of the world for reform, with a quarter of all reforms taking place there. Georgia (15), Estonia (22), Lithuania (28) and Latvia (29) lead the former Soviet countries in the rating.
Russia dropped eight places to 120th place in the rating, with Bosnia and Herzegovina above it at 119th and Nepal below at 121st. Russia’s poor showing came in spite of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s anticorruption plan and the passage in the State Duma of the first reading of a draft law to encourage small and medium-sized business. Svetlana Bagaudinova, one of the authors of the report, told Kommersant that the rating does not indicate where it is easier to do business. She said that receiving construction permits was an especially problematic point in Russia’s rating.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 10, 2008
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