Kathmandu, October 31

Even as Nepal’s global standing in ease of doing business has improved by two spots to stand at 105, the country slipped to third position in ranking among South Asian economies. This was mainly due to huge improvement made by India, which advanced to 100th position globally, up around 30 places, out of 190 economies covered.

On the distance to frontier metric, Nepal’s score went up from 58.88 in Doing Business 2017 to 59.95 in Doing Business 2018.

The distance to frontier (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.

Under the  method, rankings are determined by sorting aggregate distance to  frontier scores in various topics related to conducive business  environment as considered by World Bank, each comprising several  indicators, giving equal weightage to each topic.

Among notable achievements, Nepal strengthened access to credit by operationalising existing law on secured transactions that implements a functional secured transactions system and established a centralised, notice-based, modern collateral registry in topic of ‘getting credit’. In terms of ‘protecting minority investors’, Nepal strengthened minority investor protections by requiring greater corporate transparency, the report states.

Bhutan retained top position in South Asia in ease of doing business, ranking 75th globally. Nepal managed to outrank Sri Lanka (111), Maldives (136), Pakistan (147), Bangladesh (177) and Afghanistan (183).

Globally, apart from India, Brunei Darussalam, Thailand, Malawi, Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Zambia, Nigeria, Djibouti and El Salvador were the most improved economies in 2016-17. Together, these 10 top improvers implemented 53 regulatory reforms making it easier to do business.

Doing Business 2018: Reforming to Create Jobs, a World Bank Group flagship publication, is the 15th in a series of annual reports measuring the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Doing Business presents quantitative indicators on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 190 economies and over time.

Economies in all regions are implementing reforms easing the process of doing business, but Europe and Central Asia continues to be the region with the highest share of economies implementing at least one reform — 76 per cent of economies in the region have implemented at least one business regulatory reform, followed by South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, as per the report.

Nepal’s scorecard

Topics

DB 2018 rank

Regional position

Overall

105

3

Starting a business

109

5

Dealing with construction permits

157

6

Getting electricity

133

4

Registering property

84

2

Getting credit

90

3

Protecting minority investors

62

4

Paying taxes

146

4

Trading across borders

76

2

Enforcing contracts

153

3

Resolving insolvency

76

1