The 2013 Doing Business report from the World Bank has just been published, and Singapore remains on top for the seventh straight year according to the ‘ease of doing business’ rankings. Hong Kong and New Zealand also retained their second and third rankings respectively, as did the US in fourth place.
Drilling down to notable APAC markets to compare with last year’s rankings, we can see that Taiwan jumped from 25th to 16th, credited with big improvements by a number of criteria, including ‘protecting investors.’ Japan, on the other hand, was downgraded in many areas, including ‘starting a business.’
| Country | 2013 | 2012 |
|---|---|---|
| Singapore | 1 | 1 |
| Hong Kong | 2 | 2 |
| New Zealand | 3 | 3 |
| Korea, Rep. | 8 | 9 |
| Australia | 10 | 11 |
| Malaysia | 12 | 14 |
| Taiwan | 16 | 25 |
| Thailand | 18 | 17 |
| Japan | 24 | 20 |
| China | 91 | 91 |
| Vietnam | 99 | 99 |
| Indonesia | 128 | 130 |
| India | 132 | 132 |
| Philippines | 138 | 136 |
If you’d like to check out the entire report, head on over to DoingBusiness.org, or view the rankings page here if you’re in the mood to digest some numbers. If you’d like the tl;dr version, I’ve included their infographic below.
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