'Zim one of the worst countries to do business'

Published: 31 October 2013

Zimbabwe has declined two positions to 170 out of 185 countries on the ease of doing business, according to the latest World Bank 2014 report.

Despite the implementation of the midterm policy as its economic blue print for the past two years, the country has continued to fare poorly on most indicators, raking 150 on starting a business,170 on dealing with construction permits, getting electricity 157, trading across borders 167, enforcing contracts 118 and 156 on resolving insolvency.

"According to data collected by Doing Business, starting a business there requires nine procedures, takes 90 days, costs 141,2 percent of income per capita and requires paid-in minimum capital of 0,0 percent of income per capita," the WB report noted.

"Globally, Zimbabwe stands at 109 in the ranking of 189 economies on the ease of getting credit."
The country however, improved by 1,46 percentage points to 42,12 percentage points on the distance to frontier (DTF) measure.

DTF shows the distance of each economy to the "frontier," which represents the highest performance observed on each of the topics including getting electricity across all economies included in Doing Business.

Singapore and Hong Kong rank as the world's best places to run a business, with New Zealand, the United States and Denmark making up the top five. The Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic and Chad were the five worst ranked countries.

The report measures the ease of starting a business in an economy by recording all procedures officially required or commonly done in practice by an industrial or commercial business.

Zimbabwe is currently recovering from a decade of economic stagnation and has struggled to attract foreign direct investment with a paltry $400 million coming through last year, compared to neighbouring countries, Mozambique and South Africa which got $5 billion and $4,6 billion respectively due to policy inconsistencies and a lack of investor confidence.

The WB report is however, expected to be reviewed after a finding by an independent panel set up by the WB president, Jim Yong Kim and led by South Africa's Planning minister Trevor Manuel, found it could be misleading and should cease being produced.

According to the findings, the rankings could too easily be affected by small factors and were sometimes not objective. Instead of a ranking, the panel has recommended assigning scores for each of the indicators for each country.
- dailynews

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