Doing Business measures aspects of regulation affecting eleven areas of the life of a business. Ten of these areas are included in this year’s ranking on the ease of doing business: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency. Doing Business also measures features of labor market regulation, which is not included in this year’s ranking.

Data in Doing Business 2018 are current as of June 1, 2017. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms of business regulation have worked, where and why.

Main findings:

Doing Business 2018: Reforming to Create Jobs reveals that entrepreneurs in 119 economies observed improvements in the local regulatory frameworks last year. The report, which compares 190 economies throughout the world, documented 264 business reforms between June 2016 and June 2017. Out of the reforms to reduce complexity and the cost of enforcing business legislation, those identified in the areas of starting a business and getting credit were the most common in 2016/2017. The next most common reforms took place in the trading across borders area. Read about the reforms implemented (in English).

Brunei Darussalam, Thailand, Malawi, Kosovo, India, Uzbekistan, Zambia, Nigeria, Djibouti and El Salvador are the economies that improved the most in the 2016/2017 period in the areas evaluated by Doing Business. Together, these are the ten economies with the most significant global improvement and they implemented 53 regulatory reforms that facilitate doing business.

Economies in all the regions are implementing reforms that facilitate doing business. Europe and Central Asia continue to be the regions with the greatest proportion of economies where at least one reform has been implemented – 79% of the economies in the region have implemented at least one regulatory reform –, followed by Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The report includes four case studies in the areas of starting a business, dealing with construction permits, paying taxes and resolving insolvency. It also includes the labor market regulation indicator as an appendix. See the case studies (in English).

Information taken from:  http://espanol.doingbusiness.org/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2018