Botswana slips in doing business rankings
Brian Benza | Tuesday November 4, 2014 15:32
According to the World Bank’s 2015 Doing Business report released this week, from the 189 countries surveyed, Botswana is now placed at position 74 from a revised position of 66 last year.
The Doing Business report sheds light on how easy or difficult it is for a local entrepreneur to open and run a small to medium-size business when complying with relevant regulations.
It measures and tracks changes in regulations affecting 11 areas in the lifecycle of a business from starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency and labour market regulations.
Botswana’s fall in rankings comes despite a marginal rise in the score to 64.9 points from 64.7 points last year suggesting that other countries are implementing reforms to the ease of doing business at a faster pace than Botswana.
According to the report, Botswana registered the largest fall in the paying taxes category where the country slipped eight places to position 67.
The category looks at the administrative burden of complying with taxes in Botswana and it showed that on average, firms make 34.0 tax payments a year, spend 152.0 hours a year filing, preparing and paying taxes and pay total taxes amounting to 25.3 percent of profit.
At Sub-Saharan Africa level, the 2015 report ranks Botswana’s fifth after Mauritius (28), South Africa (43) and Rwanda (46) and Ghana (70).
The second largest contributor to Botswana’s fall in rankings was in the getting credit category where the country slid six rungs to position 61.
In the survey, the categories of getting electricity and protecting of minority investors both slipped by four places.
“According to data collected by Doing Business, getting electricity there requires 5.0 procedures, takes 121.0 days and costs 340.4 percent of income per capita,” read the report entitled: Going Beyond Efficiency.
In this category Botswana’s peers Namibia and Mauritius were placed at positions 66 and 41 respectively.
Since 2003, the authoritative World Bank report has compared the ease of doing business across global economies, allocating rankings according to defined indicators and data sourced from participating economies.
From five indicators measuring business regulation and 133 economies in 2003, the report has grown to 11 indicators and 189 economies in the 2015 edition.
The fall in the rankings come after numerous reforms initiated in the last four years through the formation of a Doing Business Cabinet subcommittee as well as the National Doing Business Committee.
The multi-sectoral committee is credited with driving several policy changes aimed at enhancing the country’s investment and operating climate for businesses by addressing the weaknesses pointed out by the Doing Business and Global Competitiveness reports.
Globally, Singapore tops the list of business-friendly economies globally, while five of the top 10 most improved countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Sub-Saharan Africa countries also had the highest number of regulatory reforms — 75 of 230 around the world.
The report observes that from June 2013 to June 2014, 35 out of the 47 economies in Sub-Saharan Africa implemented at least one regulatory reform making it easier to do business with a set of 75 reforms in total.