WASHINGTON, September 10, 2008: Ida is a Gambian entrepreneur who wants to sell her land to expand her manufacturing business. She has an interested buyer, but transferring property in The Gambia requires ministerial consent and can take up to a year.
The Gambia is one of the 12 countries in the world where government approval is required for such economic transactions. Others are Lesotho, Madagascar, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Solomon Islands, Tanzania, Tonga, Uganda and Zambia.
Simplifying procedures to register property encourages investment and gives entrepreneurs, like Ida, better access to credit to grow businesses and create jobs.
Twenty-four countries made it easier to register property this past year, according to Doing Business 2009, a joint World Bank-IFC publication, which tracks ten stages in the lifecycle of a business, ranks countries on their regulatory ease of doing business, and identifies the fastest reformers.
Registering property is one of the 239 reforms the report tracked in 113 countries between June 2007 and June 2008.
Azerbaijan is this year’s top reformer with the most regulatory reforms, according to the report.
The country set up a one-stop shop for business startup in January, halving the time, cost, and number of steps required to start a business. As a result, business registrations increased by 40 per cent in the first six months of its operation.
Transferring property now takes 11 days, as opposed to 61 days it took before, thanks to a unified property registry for land and real estate transactions. Taxpayers can also fill out and pay taxes online, saving on average more than 500 hours a year in dealing with paperwork.
Almost all countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have made reforms, making it the leader among regions with most regulatory reforms. Three of its other countries—Albania, Kyrgyz Republic, and Belarus—are also among this year’s top ten reformers.
Sub-Saharan Africa has had a record year for regulatory reforms that make it easier to do business, with 28 countries completing 58 reforms.
Extensive business reforms have spread across Eastern Europe and Central Asia.Botswana, Burkina Faso, and Senegal are among the world’s top ten reformers. Senegal, the region’s leading reformer, reduced business startup time from 58 days to eight, when it streamlined business registration and merged seven startup procedures into one.
This resulted in an 80 per cent increase in new business registrations in the first ten months after the reform.
In other countries, such as Botswana and Namibia, entrepreneurs now benefit from computerized registration systems.
– Economies need rules that are efficient, easy to use, and accessible to all who use them. Otherwise, businesses are trapped in the unregulated, informal economy, where they have less access to finance and hire fewer workers and where workers lack the protection of labor law, said Michael Klein, World Bank/IFC Vice President for Financial and Private Sector Development.
Top 10 Reformers
Azerbaijan
Albania
Kyrgyz Republic
Belarus (Hvide Rusland)
Senegal
Burkina Faso
Botswana
Colombia
Dominican Republic
Egypt
For more information, go to www.doingbusiness.org.
Kilde: Verdensbanken
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