Both Saudi Arabia and Oman improved the most globally in the areas of Registering Property and Getting Electricity, respectively. Saudi Arabia introduced a new computerized land registry system. It now takes an entrepreneur only six days to register property in Saudi Arabia, faster than in the Republic of Korea. Oman enhanced its measurements and tracking of power outages, making it is easier to assess the reliability of the electrical grid and its effect on the productivity of firms.
Economies in the region carried out the most reforms in the area of Getting Electricity (4 reforms), followed by Starting a Business (3), Dealing with Construction Permits (3) and Trading Across Borders (3).
Challenges, however, remain in a number of areas. For example, on Starting a Business, it costs an average of 26 percent of income per capita for local entrepreneurs to start their business, compared to 3 percent in the OECD.
This year’s Doing Business report completes a two-year effort to expand benchmarks that measure the quality of regulation, as well as the efficiency of the business regulatory framework, in order to better capture realities on the ground. On the five indicators that saw changes in this report – Dealing with Construction Permits, Getting Electricity, Enforcing Contracts, Registering Property and Trading Across Borders – Middle East and North Africa economies do not perform well. On Getting Electricity, for instance, the new dataset finds that several regional economies face either frequent outages or do not track them adequately.
Ranks of other large economies in the region are Algeria (163), Egypt (131), Iran (118), Morocco (75), Qatar (68), Saudi Arabia (82) and Tunisia (74).
