Bangkok, October 29, 2014—A new World Bank Group report finds that Thailand further improved its business environment over the past year. The country continues to rank among the top 30 economies worldwide and second among emerging economies of East Asia on the ease of doing business.
Launched today, Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency introduces a number of methodological refinements in the annual report series. To better capture the quality of regulations, the report expands the data for three of the 10 topics covered. In addition, the ease of doing business ranking is now based on the distance to frontier score. This measure shows how close each economy is to global best practices in business regulation. A higher score indicates a more efficient business environment and stronger legal institutions. Finally, Doing Business now collects data for a second city in the 11 economies with a population of more than 100 million.
With these changes in methodology taken into account, Thailand’s standing in the ease of doing business ranking improved from 28th in last year’s Doing Business report to 26th in this year’s report. The report finds that Thailand ranks among the top 30 economies in the world in five areas: dealing with construction permits (at 6th in the global ranking), getting electricity (12th), protecting minority investors (25th), enforcing contracts (25th), and registering property (28th). And the report recognizes that in 2013/14, Thailand made dealing with construction permits less time-consuming by introducing a fast-track approval process for building permits for smaller buildings.
“Through its public service improvement program over the past 10 years, Thailand has implemented reforms to improve the ease of doing business. This has benefited local entrepreneurs, who now have fewer regulatory hurdles to deal with and more resources to focus on their business,” said Ulrich Zachau, Country Director for Thailand, World Bank Group. “Thailand has also used technology to improve the regulatory environment for businesses. For example, the use of electronic systems has reduced both the number of documents and the time needed for exporting and importing by almost half since 2007.”
Overall, the report places Singapore at the top of the global ranking on the ease of doing business. Joining it on the list of the top 10 economies with the most business-friendly regulatory environments are New Zealand; Hong Kong SAR, China; Denmark; the Republic of Korea; Norway; the United States; the United Kingdom; Finland; and Australia.
About the Doing Business report series
The annual World Bank Group flagship Doing Business report analyzes regulations that apply to an economy’s businesses during their life cycle, including start-up and operations, trading across borders, paying taxes, and resolving insolvency. The aggregate ease of doing business rankings are based on the distance to frontier scores for 10 topics and cover 189 economies. Doing Businessdoes not measure all aspects of the business environment that matter to firms and investors. For example, it does not measure the quality of fiscal management, other aspects of macroeconomic stability, the level of skills in the labor force, or the resilience of financial systems. Its findings have stimulated policy debates worldwide and enabled a growing body of research on how firm-level regulation relates to economic outcomes across economies. Each year the report team works to improve the methodology and to enhance their data collection, analysis and output. The project has benefited from feedback from many stakeholders over the years. With a key goal to provide an objective basis for understanding and improving the local regulatory environment for business around the world, the project goes through rigorous reviews to ensure its quality and effectiveness. This year’s report marks the 12th edition of the global Doing Business report series.
