Saudi Arabia improves ease of doing business score in World Bank’s annual ranking

Saudi Arabia has improved its 2019 Ease of Doing Business (EODB) score by 1.62 percent from last year to rank 92nd among 190 economies, according to the latest annual ranking by the World Bank.

“Saudi Arabia continued its efforts to improve the business climate for domestic and medium sized businesses,” noted the report that investigates the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it.

Regulations affecting 11 areas of the life of a business are covered: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency and labor market regulation. The labor market regulation data are not included in this year’s ranking on the ease of doing business.

The EODB score captures the gap of each economy from the best regulatory performance observed on each of the indicators across all economies.

In the past year, Saudi Arabia reduced the gap to the best performers by improving the Ease of Doing Business score to 63.5 points.

Specifically, the country moved closer to the frontier in seven out of ten doing business indicators —starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, protecting minority investors, trading across borders, and enforcing contracts.

Saudi Arabia has a global rank of 7 in the protecting minority investors criterion, scoring a perfect 10 on the extent of corporate transparency index. The Kingdom also scores 6 out of 8 on the reliability of supply and transparency of tariff index, higher than the GCC region’s average score of 4.2 on this index.

In addition to stellar performance in protecting minority investors, Saudi Arabia also performs well in the doing business areas of registering property and dealing with construction permits, the report noted. The Kingdom ranks 36 globally in the dealing with construction permits area, the report added.

In notable changes to the top 20 ranked economies this year, the UAE joins the grouping for the first time, in 11th place, while Malaysia and Mauritius regain spots, in 15th and 20th places, respectively.

Overall, the report finds that governments around the world set a new record in bureaucracy busting efforts for the domestic private sector, implementing 314 business reforms over the past year. The Middle East and North Africa region scaled a new high with 43 reforms.

New Zealand tops the global ranking in the ease of doing business.