Cutting the red tape: Singapore ranks poorly in business transparency

We’re almost in the bottom half.

The 2014 Arachnys Open Data Compass measures the availability of open, online, compliance-relevant information across the world, revealing for the 1st time that China leads other major nations including the USA in offering business-critical open data to global investors, while Singapore ‘s corporate and litigation data has been effectively privatised behind member-only paywalls, significantly hampering the speed and ease of due diligence.

According to Arachnys, due diligence or the investigation or audit of a potential investment is required in doing good business in emerging markets. The survey indicated that Singapore falls far behind what might be expected from such a highly developed nation.

Ease of doing business in Singapore is hampered by red tape, and Arachnys says that the country has invested in the technology needed to speed up registration processes, but little of this data is openly available, resulting in its disappointing Compass score.

Finally, Singapore is no longer an outlier in the press freedom index, revealing that the country’s middling performance says it is not entirely as open and liberal as implied by the CPI and World Bank indices.

View the full report here.