Turkey ranks 55 out of 189 countries in ease doing business: Report

ISTANBUL/WASHINGTON

Turkey dropped to 55th place in the World Bank's list this year, from 51st on last year's updated list. The drop was largely caused by the increase in companies' minimum capital requirements in Turkey. DAILY NEWS photo

Turkey ranked 55 out of the 189 countries surveyed for the World Bank’s latest annual Ease of Doing Business report, dropping four spots from last year.

“Turkey dropped to 55th place in the list this year out of 189 counties, from 51st on last year's updated list. This tiny drop was caused by the increase in the minimum capital requirements in Turkey," said the World Bank's Turkey Director Martin Raiser in a written statement on Oct. 29.

"We can say that Turkey is in a good position in terms of ease of doing business and it has a score that can be expected from an upper-middle income country, but it needs to make more reforms to compete with the best performers in the list,” Raiser added.

Turkey originally ranked 69 in the report last year, but it rose to 51 after the World Bank made changes to its calculation method.

The ease of doing business ranking is now based on the "distance to frontier" score. This measure shows how close each economy is to global best practices in business regulation. A higher score indicates a more efficient business environment and stronger legal institutions, according to the World Bank report.

“When the distance to frontier score is taken into consideration, we see that Turkey’s score has increased. This is very good,” said Raiser.

However, the report stated that Turkey had made starting a business more difficult by increasing notary and company registration fees. It also added that Turkey had made doing business harder by increasing companies' social security costs.

On the other hand, the World Bank praised Turkey for making the enforcing of contracts easier by introducing an electronic filing system for court users.

Overall, the World Bank’s 12th annual report found that the 10 economies with the most business-friendly regulatory environments are Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong SAR, China, Denmark,  the Republic of Korea, Norway,  the U.S., the U.K., Finland and Australia. The 10 economies that have improved the most since last year are Tajikistan, Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Azerbaijan, Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates.

“While 80 percent of the countries in the study improved their business regulations last year, only about one-third moved up in the rankings. However, the gap between the best and worst-performing countries continues to narrow as countries improve their business climates,” wrote Rita Ramalho, manager of the Doing Business Project in the opening remarks of the report.

“It’s easier to do business this year than it was last year, [and easier] than it was two years ago or 10 years ago,” she added. “We see that the economies that score the lowest are reforming more intensely, so they are converging toward the economies that do the best.”