Doing Business in the Arab World 2011

Author: Doing Business
Published: April 1, 2011 (912 KB PDF)

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Note

Beginning in early 2011, the Arab world and the broader Middle East and North Africa region has witnessed a series of sweeping political changes. Although driven by a variety of factors, one key driver of these changes has been a sense of frustration, particularly by young people, that they have not been able to find jobs. Doing Business in the Arab World 2011 is the third in a series of annual reports benchmarking the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it in 20 economies in the Arab world. The report presents quantitative indicators on business regulation and the protection of property rights in those 20 economies, and it is based wholly on the data and analysis of the Doing Business 2011 report that was published in November 2010. The data are current as of June 2010. Doing Business is limited in scope. It takes the perspective of domestic, primarily smaller companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle. It does not measure all aspects of the business environment that matter to firms and investors or affect the competitiveness of an economy. Its aim is simply to supply business leaders and policy makers with a fact base for informing policy making and to provide open data for research on how business regulations and institutions affect such economic outcomes as productivity, investment, informality, corruption, unemployment and poverty.

Overview

Last year, 10 of 20 economies in the Arab world adopted a total of 18 business regulation reforms to create opportunity for domestic entrepreneurs, according to Doing Business in the Arab World 2011. While the second fastest reforming region the previous year, the Arab world slipped to sixth out of seven last year.

In the past five years, about 85 percent of the world’s economies made it easier for local entrepreneurs to operate, through 1,511 improvements to business regulation as measured by the report. Of 174 economies, 17 Arab economies improved business regulation over the past 5 years, although the pace was slower over the past year.

Main Findings

• Trade facilitation has been high on the business regulation reform priority list. Six economies in the region modernized customs procedures and port infrastructure—Bahrain, the Arab Republic of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and West Bank and Gaza. Also popular was improving credit information systems, which occurred in the Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the United Arab Emirates.
• Businesses in the Arab world on average need to wait 657 days to enforce a contract through the court, the third longest average globally.
• Many of the region’s business regulation reforms in the past year involved new information technologies from the payment of taxes to online business registration to electronic data interchange systems for trade.