• Doing Business in a More Transparent World


    Doing Business 2012 shows that governments in 125 economies out of 183 measured implemented a total of 245 business regulatory reforms—13 percent more reforms than in the previous year. The report rankings on ease of doing business have expanded to include indicators on getting electricity.

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  • Doing Business

    Making a difference for entrepreneurs


    Kazakhstan improved business regulation the most in the past year, according to Doing Business 2011: Making a Difference for Entrepreneurs. In the past five years, about 85 percent of the world's economies have made it easier for local entrepreneurs to operate, through 1,511 improvements to business regulation.

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  • A record in business regulation reform


    Doing Business 2010 reported a record number of reforms between June 2008 and May 2009, despite the challenges presented by the financial crisis. This year’s reformers focused on making it easier to start and operate a business, pay taxes, and reform bankruptcy procedures to help keep companies operating and preserve jobs during tough economic times. Two regions were particularly active: Eastern Europe and Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Within both regions, competition among neighbors helped inspire widespread reform.

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  • Regulatory reforms gain momentum worldwide


    Since 2004 Doing Business has tracked regulatory reforms aimed at improving the ease of doing business in the world’s economies—from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Doing Business 2009, the sixth report in the series, found that regulatory reforms are gaining momentum worldwide, reaching record numbers between June 2007 and June 2008. For the fifth year in a row, the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region led the world in Doing Business reforms, with more than 90 percent of its countries making reforms. And the trend is moving eastward as newcomers join the list of economies making the most reforms.

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  • Large emerging markets reforming fast


    Since 2004 Doing Business has tracked regulatory reforms aimed at improving the ease of doing business in the world’s economies—from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Doing Business 2008, the fifth report in the series, found that large emerging markets—such as China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and Vietnam—were reforming fast. The report also found that more businesses were starting up, thanks to reforms of business regulation in the period tracked—April 2006 to June 2007.

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  • How to reform


    Since 2004 Doing Business has tracked regulatory reforms aimed at improving the ease of doing business in the world’s economies. Doing Business 2007, the fourth report in the series, found that reforms were making it easier to do business worldwide, including in Africa, a region where the private sector faces some of its biggest challenges. Reformers simplified business regulations, strengthened property rights, eased tax burdens, increased access to credit, and reduced the cost of exporting and importing.

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  • Creating jobs


    Since 2004 Doing Business has tracked regulatory reforms aimed at improving the ease of doing business in the world’s economies. Doing Business 2006, the third report in the series, found that Eastern European nations were aggressively courting entrepreneurs with far-reaching reforms to streamline business regulations and taxes, but African and Middle Eastern nations with high youth unemployment rates continued to thwart small and medium businesses with heavy legal burdens and piecemeal reforms.

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  • Removing obstacles to growth


    2004 was a good year for doing business in most transition economies, the World Bank Group concluded in its Doing Business in 2005 survey, the second in its series tracking regulatory reforms aimed at improving the ease of doing business in the world’s economies. However, the survey found that conditions for starting and running a business in poorer countries were consistently more burdensome than in richer countries.

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  • Understanding regulations


    Doing Business 2004 is the very first of a series of reports investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. To document the regulation of business and investigate the effect of regulation on such economic outcomes as productivity, unemployment, growth, poverty, and informality, the Doing Business team collected and analyzed data on five topics—starting a business, hiring and firing workers, enforcing a contract, getting credit, and closing a business—for the world’s economies, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

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