Zimbabwe moved two places up the ladder on the ease of doing business to 159 from 161, the World Bank’s 2018 report has shown. According to the report the country’s distance to frontier (DTF) rose from 47,67 points to 48, 47 this year.
BY FIDELITY MHLANGA
In 2016, the country was ranked 157 out of 190 countries.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s average DTF is pegged at 50,43.
DTF measure shows the distance of each economy to the “frontier,” which represents the best performance observed on each of the indicators across all economies in the Doing Business sample since 2005.
An economy’s DTF is reflected on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 represents the lowest performance and 100 the frontier. The ease of doing business ranking ranges from 1 to 190.
Zimbabwe has been struggling to attract investment, due to policy inconsistency and bottlenecks associated with doing business in the country.
Foreign direct investment has been giving the country a wide berth, with inflows at $319 million last year from $421 million in 2015.
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Since the start of Doing Business, the sub-Saharan region carried out a total of 798 reforms.
Rwanda has implemented the most reforms in the past 15 years, totalling 52, followed by Kenya (32) and Mauritius (31).
According to the report, starting a business, with 163 reforms, was the leading indicator for regional reforms, followed by getting credit and trading across borders, with 112 and 108 reforms respectively the average number of days to start a business in the region has dropped to 22,5 days from 61 days in 2003.
Mauritius is the highest ranked economy in sub-Saharan Africa at 25. Other economies in the region that performed well on the ease of doing business rankings are Rwanda (41), Kenya (80), Botswana (81) and South Africa (82).
Rwanda ranks among the best globally in the Doing Business areas of registering property (with a rank of 2) and getting credit (6). In registering property, Rwanda has an efficient land registry where it takes seven days to transfer property and costs only 0,1% of the property value, the same as in New Zealand.
