• Home
  • About/Contact Us
  • …Donate…
  • Subscribe
  • Commenting
  • Privacy
  • DISCLAIMER
  • Interesting Stuff

Map of the Day: The World’s Best and Worst Places for Doing Business

Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 10th of December 2018 to The Sounding Line.

The following infographic, courtesy of Visual Capitalis, visualizes the results of this year’s World Bank ‘Ease of Doing Business Index (PDF),’ For the last 16 years, the index has been ranking the relative ease of ‘doing business’ around the world based on “12,500 expert contributors in 190 countries who deal with business regulations on a daily basis. The final score is based on the average of 11 factors:

Starting a business – Procedures, time, cost, and minimum capital to open a new business
Dealing with construction permits – Procedures, time, and cost to build a warehouse
Access to electricity – Procedures, time, and cost required to obtain an electricity connection for a new warehouse
Registering property – Procedures, time, and cost to register commercial real estate
Procuring credit – Strength of legal rights index, depth of credit information index
Protecting investors – Indices on the extent of disclosure, extent of director liability and ease of shareholder suits
Paying taxes – Number of taxes paid, total tax payable as share of gross profit, and hours per year spent preparing tax returns
Trading across borders – Number of documents, cost, and time necessary to import and export
Enforcing contracts – Procedures, time, and cost to enforce a debt contract
Resolving insolvency – The time, cost, and recovery rate (%) under bankruptcy proceeding
Labor market regulation – Flexibility in employment regulation and aspects of job quality”

New Zealand has taken the top spot for the last three years in a row. It is followed by Singapore, Denmark, and Hong Kong. The US has dropped to eighth place, in part because the recent corporate tax cuts do not appear to be reflected in the ranking yet. Meanwhile, Russia, China, and India have surged in recent years, though they still remain outside the top 20. Argentina has dropped to the least business friendly country in the G20. Rwanda, ranked 29th, is the only low income country in the top 50.

While the index is fairly comprehensive and certainly provides interesting insights, it seems to overlook at least three important factors that are pertinent to the ease of doing business: the overall regulatory burden, intellectual property protections, and the rule of law. For example, the EU has, or has had, regulations dictating everything from the allowable curvature of bananas, whether water can be said to be hydrating, banning the sale of eggs by the dozen, limiting the wattage of toasters, hairdriers, vacuum cleaners, and kettles, to specifying what seeds farmers can plant. Similarly, the EU’s current drive to outlaw hyperlinks and internet memes will make it much harder for many websites like The Sounding Line to exist at all. The fact that this article uses hyperlinks to point readers to its sources could literally put it afoul of upcoming EU regulations. To suggest that these sorts of regulations don’t massively effect the ease of doing business is willful ignorance. Similarly, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way in their rankings to capture the onerous rules China imposes on foreign companies hoping to open subsidiaries in China, nor its state sponsored campaign of intellectual property theft. Furthermore, Afghanistan was the most improved country in the entire list despite increasing portions of the country being under de-facto Taliban control and despite being one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. If the rule of law isn’t enforced, what difference does it make if the law improves?

P.S. If you would like to be updated via email when we post a new article, please click here. It’s free and we won’t send any promotional materials.

December 10, 2018 Taps Coogan

Post navigation

Nassim Taleb: We Tried to Fix a Debt Problem with Debt → ← Map of the Day: Every Year in the History of Scandinavia
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

TOP NEWS STORIES

  • Archaeologists Excavating Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Reveal 3000 Ornate Grave Goods
  • Japanese Utilities Hunt for Oil to Meet Robust Winter Power Demand amid Faltering LNG Stocks
  • Powell Sees ‘Exuberant Spending’ After Pandemic
  • Ireland Has Corals that Survive in Extreme Conditions at the Edge of a Submarine Canyon
  • China Possibly Committed ‘Genocide’: US Commission
  • NASA Test of Mega Moon Rocket Engines Cut Short
  • China Stonewalls WHO Investigators
  • United States Cut China Aid in Half in 2020
  • China Building Ground-Effect Vehicles to Defend South China Sea Claims: Leaked Documents
  • Massive Inflation in Shipping Costs – the Reasons
  • Quantum Internet Signals Beamed Between Drones a Kilometre Apart
  • Two Northern White Rhino Embryos Successfully Created. Finally a Glimmer of Hope for Species with Just Two Living Members
  • NASA Gives up Trying to Burrow Under Mars Surface with ‘Mole’ Probe
  • One Company to Rule Them All: Google Closes Fitbit Deal Amid Ongoing U.S. DOJ Review, Offers Empty Platitudes About Privacy
  • Race Is on to Commercialize Fusion Energy
  • Ukraine in Talks to Dump Kalashnikovs for NATO Compatible Rifle
  • Most Distant Quasar Ever Found Is Hiding ‘Biggest’ and ‘Youngest’ Black Hole
  • Russia Might Issue Fines for Using SpaceX Starlink Internet Service for Circumventing Government Censors
  • Astronomers May Have Detected Background Ripples in Spacetime Itself
  • Parler App CEO, Family Go into Hiding After Receiving Death Threats
  • WhatsApp Users’ Mobile Numbers from Desktop App Found Via Indexing on Google Search
  • 2,700-Year-Old Tombs of High-Ranking Nobles Unearthed in North China’s Shanxi Province
  • You Can’t ‘Just Build Your Own Twitter’
  • Food Inflation Fuels Anti-Government Protests in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir
  • Turkey Accused of Trading Uighurs for Chinese Covid-19 Vaccine
  • Russia Building Coastal Base for ‘Doomsday Nuke’ – Reports
  • Can the U.S. Navy Keep up with China? (Not Without Becoming Industrially Competitive Again…)
  • More Than a Quarter of US Households Will Cut the Cord in 2021
  • Is US Energy Independence on the Way out?
  • China Mulls Allowing Some Australian Coal Imports amid Ban
  • Exodus: Tech Workers Are leaving San Francisco Behind
  • U.S. Navy to Arm Amphibious Vessels with Long-Range Missiles
  • Malaysia Takes WTO Legal Action Against EU over Palm Biofuel Curbs
  • Trump’s Parting Shot to China Should Be Full U.S. Recognition of Taiwan
  • US Troop Levels in Afghanistan Reduced to 2500
  • Israel Launches Intense Strikes on Iranian Positions in Syria
  • 60 Palaeolithic Cave Sites Found in Central China
  • 6,000 Amazon Warehouse Workers Will Hold Union Vote in Alabama
  • Bill Gates Is Now the Biggest Owner of American Farmland
  • Astronomers Have Discovered an Alien Planet with Three Suns
  • Inside California’s Colossal Container-Ship Traffic Jam
  • China’s 2020 Copper Imports Hit Record High
  • Iron Ore Price Turns Higher Again After Record China Imports
  • Rio Tinto to Open North America’s First Scandium Plant in June
  • China, Indonesia on a Collision Course at Sea
  • South Africa May Lose All of Its Large Refineries in 2021
  • LNG’s Unprecedented Surge to Apply Brakes on India’s Imports, Consumption
  • Hundreds of Pieces of Fine Art, Worth Millions, Rushed in and out of U.K. Ahead of Brexit Cutoff
  • Canada’s Mortgage Lenders Have Set Aside a Record Amount for Bad Loans
  • Russia May Ditch Its Cursed Aircraft Carrier and Focus on Its Two New Amphibious Assault Ships
  • Goldman Sachs Warns of Bullish Perfect Storm for Natural Gas
  • Calculations Suggest It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI
  • US to Bar Entry to Chinese Navy Officials, Business Execs Involved in Militarizing South China Sea
  • U.S. Navy Ohio Class Submarine Filmed by Iranian Navy While Submerged
  • Citing Permanent Shift to Work from Home, Dropbox Cuts 11% of Its Workforce

Seach

Categories

Login

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
Copyright © 2020 - TheSoundingLine.com | Please read our full disclaimer and privacy policy before reading any of our content
wpDiscuz