Vietnam up nine notches in World Bank Doing Business 2017 report
Vietnam up nine notches in World Bank Doing Business 2017 report
Vietnam climbed nine spots in the latest World Bank survey that ranks economies worldwide by measuring their business environment.
Vietnam jumped from 91st to the 82nd spot out of 190 economies measured in the Doing Business 2016: Equal Opportunity for All report, the 14th edition of the World Bank’s flagship publication that was released Wednesday.
The Southeast Asian country posted improvements in such indicators as Getting electricity (up five places); Protecting minority investors (+31); Paying taxes (+11); Trading across borders (+15); and Resolving insolvency (+1).
However, Vietnam’s rankings fell in other indicators, including Starting a business (down ten notches); Dealing with construction permits (-3); Getting credit (-3); Registering property (-1); and Labor market regulation (-1).
Besides the ease of doing business index, the World Bank report also ranks the economies based on the second measure: distance to frontier scores.
The ranking of economies is determined by sorting the aggregate distance to frontier scores, rounded to two decimals.
According to the World Bank, an economy’s distance to frontier score is indicated on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the worst performance and 100 the frontier.
The distance to frontier score benchmarks economies with respect to regulatory best practice, showing the absolute distance to the best performance on each Doing Business indicator.
“When compared across years, the distance to frontier score shows how much the regulatory environment for local entrepreneurs in an economy has changed over time in absolute terms, while the ease of doing business ranking can show only how much the regulatory environment has changed relative to that in other economies,” the report explains.
Vietnam’s distance to frontier score for 2017 stands at 63.83, compared to 61.11 in the previous report.
On the global scale, the Doing Business 2017 report found that a record 137 economies around the world have adopted key reforms that make it easier to start and operate small and medium-d businesses.
The report also finds that developing countries carried out more than 75 percent of the 283 reforms in the past year, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for over one-quarter of all reforms.
In its global country rankings of business efficiency, Doing Business 2017 awarded its coveted top spot to New Zealand.
Singapore ranks second, followed by Denmark, Hong Kong, South Korea, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, and Macedonia.
By region, East Asia and the Pacific is home to two of the world’s top ten ranked economies -- Singapore and Hong Kong, and two of the top ten improvers, Brunei and Indonesia.
The pace of reforms picked up significantly in the past year, with the region’s economies implementing a total of 45 reforms to improve the ease of doing business.
