The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region had the world's smallest share of economies implementing at least one business regulatory reform in 2012/13, according to the new IFC-World Bank Doing Business Report 2014. Only 40 per cent of the region's economies had carried out reforms in the areas measured by the report, compared to 75 per cent in South Asia and 73 per cent in Europe and Central Asia. The Doing Business report is an annual study that measures the ease of doing business worldwide in 10 different areas. The report's rankings covered 189 economies this year, with Egypt ranking 128 compared to 109 last year. According to Joanna Nasr, a member of the report team, the country's reduced ranking was due to the fact that other countries had improved and had introduced more reforms than Egypt over the past year. Consequently, these countries had preceded Egypt in global rankings. “Considering the circumstances Egypt has been passing through over the past three years, our ranking is good,” Hassan Fahmi, chairman of the General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI), told Al-Ahram Weekly. He added that despite the current unrest, Egypt had continued to work on improving its business climate and that this was getting better. Fahmi said that Egypt's ranking in the Doing Business report for 2006 had been 165 out of 175, but this year it stood at 128 out of 189, a much better ranking. The report, entitled “Understanding Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises,” said that economies in the region had been slow to adopt new technologies for filing and paying taxes. Only five of 20 countries in the region had introduced the kind of electronic filing and payment systems now widely used by firms. These included Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which had introduced reforms in this area over the past five years. The report also said that governments in the MENA region were continuing to face complex challenges in improving the business regulatory environment as a result of political and civil unrest and that the reform momentum had slowed down since 2011. Syria was the economy whose regulatory environment had deteriorated the most in 2013. According to Hassan, the government has been facing challenges improving the business climate because some procedures have needed legislative reforms which have not been feasible due to the absence of a parliament. However, the government had pinpointed needed reforms that would increase Egypt's ranking in the 10 areas measured by the report and it was ready to carry them out, he said. The report stated that despite the challenges faced by the region as a whole, several economies had continued to take steps to improve their business climates. The UAE and Saudi Arabia ranked among the top 30 economies in the global ranking on the ease of doing business, scoring 23 and 26, respectively. The report showed that since 2005, 95 per cent of the economies in the region had implemented business regulatory reforms in the areas measured. Taken together, the 20 economies had recorded 182 reforms, with Egypt implementing the highest number in the region. Egypt had implemented 24 reforms during this period, followed by Saudi Arabia with 19 and Morocco with 18. Egypt also topped the region in three of the 10 indicators measured by the report, namely starting a business, getting credit, and trading across borders. The report showed that Egypt had implemented six reforms in the field of starting a business since 2007, reducing the time needed to start a business from 29 to eight days. Egypt had also improved its credit information systems. Meanwhile, Egypt ranks at the bottom among MENA countries in regard to dealing with construction permits, paying taxes, and enforcing contracts. The report stated that Egypt had made paying taxes more costly for companies by increasing its corporate income tax. Globally, the report showed that governments around the world had significantly stepped up their pace of improving business regulations in 114 economies last year, an 18 per cent jump from the previous year and laying the groundwork for local entrepreneurs to expand their work. Singapore topped the global ranking on the ease of doing business for the eighth consecutive year. Joining it on the list of the top 10 economies with the most business-friendly regulations were Hong Kong, New Zealand, the United States, Denmark, Malaysia, the Republic of Korea, Georgia, Norway and the United Kingdom.
