Turkey fails to appeal to investors

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

This photo shows new buildings on Istanbul’s Asian side. One area in which Turkey shows improvement in 2012 is the construction sector, where permits and licences are now easier and cheaper to receive, a World Bank report says.

Turkey ranks 71st out of 185 countries in the World Bank’s “Doing Business 2013 Smarter Regulation for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises” report, the same position it was in last year.

“Turkey managed to maintain its ranking from the year before given that all the other countries in the sampling were able to make as many economic reforms as Turkey.”

Construction permits one key area

One major area in which Turkey has made significant reforms is the field of construction permits, where the government has made dealing with construction permits easier by eliminating requirements to build shelters in all nonresidential buildings with a total area of less than 1,500 square meters. The government has also made it cheaper to receive construction permits, and the report estimates it is now four times easier to receive such a permit. “In addition, Turkey made enforcing contracts easier by introducing a new civil procedure law,” read the report.

While last year there were only 183 countries in the report, this year the sample size increased to 185 countries. Singapore took first place with 201 reforms implemented last year alone to make doing business easier in the country.

Singapore has ranked first for seven consecutive periods. Hong Kong came second, followed by China, New Zealand, the United States, Denmark, Norway, England, South Korea, Georgia, and Australia.
The countries that registered the most improvement in their business environments were Poland, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Burundi, Costa Rica, Mongolia, Greece, Serbia and Kazakhstan.

This is the World Bank’s tenth report in this series. The report indicates that over the past ten years there have been over 2,000 structural reforms implemented by 180 global economies. For example, since 2005 the average amount of time it takes to establish a business has dropped from 50 days to 30 days.

In low income countries the amount of time dropped by nearly half.

Furthermore, the real estate transfer fees also dropped 1.2 points from 7.1 percent of the real estate’s value to 5.9 percent, figures showed.