Saudi Arabia among World Bank’s top 20 improvers in ease of doing business

The World Bank has placed Saudi Arabia among the world’s top-20 economies which have improved the most on ease of doing business score.

Saudi Arabia improved in nine areas measured by Doing Business 2020, supported by reforms under its Vision 2030 plan, the World Bank noted.

“Saudi Arabia made starting a business easier by establishing a one-stop shop and eliminating the requirement for married women to provide additional documents when applying for a national identity card,” the World Bank maintained.

Economies are selected among the list of top-20 improvers by the World Bank based on the number of reforms and on how much their ease of doing business score improved.

The Bank noted that Saudi Arabia adopted a new building code and launched an online platform for building permits.

“The Saudi Electricity Company put in place a geographic information system to simplify review of new electrical connection requests,” it said.

Also, the Bank maintained, Saudi Arabia strengthened access to credit by introducing new laws on secured transactions and insolvency.

A ministerial decision strengthened minority investor protections by increasing access to evidence at trial, the Bank added.

“A Royal Decree, among other improvements, updated Saudi Arabia’s insolvency framework by introducing a reorganization procedure. Saudi Arabia also made importing easier by upgrading systems at the Jeddah Port,” noted the Bank.

Apart from Saudi Arabia, other GCC countries included in the top-20 list include Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar.

However, the top 20 list does not reflect the best performing/ranked economies, as the World Bank will officially launch ‘Doing Business 2020’ report on October 24, 2019.

According to 2019 annual ranking by the World Bank, Saudi Arabia had improved its Ease of Doing Business score by 1.62 percent from 2018 to rank 92nd among 190 economies, Argaam reported earlier.

Write to Sunil Kumar Singh at sunil.kumar@argaamplus.com