The World Bank's Doing Business Report is issued annually and offers an international comparative assessment of an economy's position when it comes to bureaucratic barriers for setting up new small or medium-sized businesses. In its 2015 edition, the report highlights improvements in protecting minority investors as a main achievement in the business environment in Egypt this year, with the country jumping 18 places to 135th position and ranking 112 out of 189 overall. The improvement stems from regulations released in February by the Egyptian Financial Supervisory Authority (EFSA) obliging companies to inform the holders of minority shares of decisions that might affect their shareholdings or the company at large. Egypt also improved its rank on trade across borders by two notches, with the time and cost of importing and exporting less than the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region average. It takes Egypt 12 days to export at a cost of $625 per container compared to a MENA average of 19 days and $1,600. The country also gained two spots for ease of trading across borders, to rank 99th in this year's report. The worst performance was for starting a new business, where Egypt's rank dropped six spots to 73rd position despite the fact that the country has been boasting of the improvements it has introduced to minimise the number of procedures and days needed to start a business. It takes an entrepreneur eight days and seven procedures to start a company in Egypt, compared to 18.9 and nine on average in MENA region. The unexpected decline reflects the fact that the report's ranking are relative, so the retreat might be based on other countries introducing more reforms. Another retreat in ranking came in paying taxes, where Egypt moved downwards by eight spots to sit at 149th position worldwide. According to the report, investors in Egypt pay a total tax rate of 45 per cent of realised profits. The government imposed a five per cent additional profit tax on companies making more than LE1 million in profits last year, in addition to levying a capital gains tax on stock market transactions. Egypt's now persistent energy shortages were reflected in the report, as the country's position in the ease of getting electricity gauge retreated by four places compared to last year. It takes an investor in Egypt seven procedures and 54 days to acquire electricity for his company's or factory's premises. With only 5.8 per cent of Egypt's youth covered by the public credit registry, Egypt lost four places in this criterion, coming in at 71st. The country maintained its 2014 positions in two criteria: registering properties and enforcing contracts. According to the report, it takes more than 1,000 days to enforce a contract in Egypt, almost double the average time for OECD countries. The report authors this year introduced a new measure to assess countries' performances. The distance to frontier (DTF) gauge represents a departure from the former method based on ranking countries by an aggregate of their scores in various areas. The DTF score shows how far on average an economy is at a given point in time from the best performance achieved by that economy on each Doing Business indicator. Applying this measure showed an improvement in the starting a business category for Egypt, which had fallen by six places when applying the traditional gauge.
