The World Bank has ranked Nigeria as one of the least countries that are business-friendly in spite of Nigeria’s decades of economic reform.
The World Bank survey released in Washington, on Tuesday, covers from setting up a business, to dealing better with construction licenses, improving property registration, hiring new workers, paying taxes, contract enforcement and bankruptcy and access to credit, ranked Nigeria as 152 in terms of registering property among the 152 countries covered by the survey.
"Doing more to improve regulation and help entrepreneurs with far-reaching reforms streamlining business regulations and taxes, but African and Middle Eastern nations with high youth unemployment rates continue to thwart small and medium businesses with heavy legal burdens and piecemeal reforms", according to the World Bank Group.
"Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs", co-sponsored by the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, finds that such reforms, while often simple, can create many new jobs which is what Nigeria badly needs.
According to the report, "jobs are a priority for every country, and especially the poorest countries. Doing more to improve regulation and help entrepreneurs is key to creating more jobs — and more growth. It is also a key to fighting poverty. Women, who make up three quarters of the workforce in some developing economies, will be big beneficiaries. So will young people looking for their first job. The last year’s diverse range of successful reformers — from Serbia to Rwanda — are showing the way forward. We can all learn from their experience," said Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank Group.
The annual report, which for the first time provides a global ranking of 155 nations on key business regulations and reforms, finds that African nations impose the most regulatory obstacles on entrepreneurs and have been the slowest reformers over the last year. Meanwhile, every country in Eastern Europe improved at least one aspect of the business environment, and countries such as Serbia and Montenegro and Georgia topped the global rankings for most reforms enacted.
The report tracks a set of regulatory indicators related to business startup, operation, trade, payment of taxes, and closure by measuring the time and cost associated with various government requirements. For example, an entrepreneur in Mozambique must undergo 14 separate procedures taking 153 days to register a new business. In Sierra Leone, if all business taxes were paid, they would eat up 164 per cent of a company’s gross profits. In Syria, it takes 63 days, 18 documents, and 47 signatures from the time imported goods arrive in ports until they reach the factory gate.
Overall, European nations were the most active in enacting reforms. The top 12 reformers in the past year, in order, are Serbia and Montenegro, Georgia, Vietnam, Slovakia, Germany, Egypt, Finland, Romania, Latvia, Pakistan, Rwanda, and the Netherlands.