Singapore tops World Bank’s ease of business ranking for tenth straight year

The country beats New Zealand, Hong Kong once again.

Doing Business, a project that annually ranks world economies launched in 2002 by the World Bank, has once again crowned Singapore as the easiest place in the world to do business. This is the tenth consecutive year that Singapore has come out on top of 188 other economies.

Doing Business asserted that the top 20 countries in the rankings performed well not only the project’s indicators, but also in dimensions of competitiveness of other international data sets. Singapore dominated the top-performing economies of New Zealand, United States, Hong Kong and Denmark in matters such as payment of taxes, solution of insolvency, and protection of minority investors.

“The economies performing best in the Doing Business rankings therefore are not those with no regulation but those whose governments have managed to create rules that facilitate interactions in the marketplace without needlessly hindering the development of the private sector,” the report said.

Singapore was noted as having combined high efficiency and high quality in enforcing contracts. A case study for the project revealed that resolving the standard commercial dispute in Singapore only required 21 procedures and 150 days, and only costs 25.8% of the value of the claim.

“And not surprisingly, the judicial system follows several internationally recognized good practices, such as having a separate commercial court, providing arbitration, making judgments available to the public, using case management and allowing plaintiffs to file their initial complaint electronically,” the report noted.