Turkey jumps 9 places in World Bank business report

By Muhammed Ali Gurtas

ANKARA

Turkey has been ranked 60th in a World Bank list of 190 economies for ease of doing business -- a nine-step rise compared to last year.

Methodology refinements, improvements in Turkey’s regulatory environment and data revisions were credited for the improvement seen in the Doing Business 2018 report released late on Tuesday.

The country's best performance was in "protecting minority investors", ranking 20th among the economies scrutinized.

Turkey's overall distance to frontier (DTF) score increased to 69.14 from 67.98 while the regional average DTF in the Europe and Central Asia was 71.33, the report said.

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. An economy’s DTF is reflected on a scale from 0 (lowest) to 100 (frontier).

The bank noted that Turkey showed the biggest improvement in the "getting credit" item, reaching a 55 score on the DTF -- up from 45 -- to stand at 77th place among all countries surveyed.

"Turkey strengthened access to credit by adopting a new law on secured transactions that establishes a unified collateral registry and allows out-of-court enforcement of collateral," it said. "Turkey also improved its credit reporting system by adopting a new law on personal data protection."

On the deterioration side, "resolving insolvency" is the only criterion in which Turkey recorded a decline -- lowering its DTF score to 33.26 from 34.98 to arrive at 139th place.

"Turkey made resolving insolvency more difficult by suspending applications for postponement of bankruptcy procedures introduced both before and during the state of emergency," the bank said.

- Global ranking

New Zealand, Singapore and Denmark were named as the world's top business-friendly economies, followed by South Korea, Hong Kong, the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Georgia and Sweden.

The bank stated that last year 119 countries carried out 264 business reforms -- of which 78 percent was implemented by developing countries -- to create jobs, attract investment and become more competitive.

"Job creation is one of the transformational gains that countries and communities can achieve when the private sector is allowed to flourish," said World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva.

"This year’s top 10 improvers, based on reforms undertaken, are Brunei, Thailand, Malawi, Kosovo, India, Uzbekistan, Zambia, Nigeria, Djibouti and El Salvador," the bank said, pointing out the list includes economies of all income levels and sizes for the first time.

Meanwhile, the five countries with the worst business environment were listed as Somalia, Eritrea, Venezuela, South Sudan and Yemen.