Nigeria inched up five places in World Bank’s 2015 Doing Business released Thursday by the Breton Woods Institution.
The country moved upwards five places from the ranking table moving from 175th position in the current index ranking to 170th .
World Bank in a statement said that it incorporated in Kano in its analysis on Nigeria for for 2015.
It further said that Nigeria is one of 11 economies with a population of more than 100 million where the report now covers two cities, providing new insights into the variability of business regulation within economies.
Doing Business is a yearly report of the Bretton Woods institution that analyses 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 Business does 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
Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency finds that differences between cities are common in indicators measuring the steps, time, and cost to complete regulatory transactions where local agencies play a larger role. For example, resolving a commercial dispute takes 720 days in Kano but 447 days in Lagos.
Since 2005, the Doing Business project shows, Nigeria has implemented 10 regulatory reforms making it easier to do business. The majority have focused on improving business incorporation, trade, and credit reporting systems—allowing the country to gradually narrow the gap with the best regulatory practices in the region. The report finds that Nigeria ranks among the top five economies in Sub-Saharan Africa in two areas: the ease of getting credit and the strength of minority investor protections.
