Macedonia is ranked 11th in the latest edition of the annual World Bank Group’s “Doing Business” report, being the best-ranked economy alongside Georgia (9th) and Lithuania (16th) in the region of Europe and Central Asia.
The report says that Georgia has implemented the most reforms in the past 15 years, totaling 47, followed by Kazakhstan and Macedonia with 41 each.
“Despite a prolonged political crisis, Macedonia remains one of the top ranked economies, in terms of ease of doing business,” said Marco Mantovanelli, Country Manager at the World Bank Office in Skopje.
According to him, this is welcome news, but it is important that the full range of factors and policies that affect the quality of an economy’s business environment and national competitiveness and are not captured by Doing Business are also addressed, in order for the country to achieve the hoped-for impact on firm productivity gains and attract more investments.
Macedonia is the only upper-middle-income economy within the top 20 in the overall measure of the ease of doing business, carrying out the second highest number of reforms (41) among the top 20.
“The country initiated sweeping construction reforms in 2007/08, mandating the use of private engineers licensed by the Chamber of Engineers to undertake independent building plan reviews. Since then, Macedonia has seen significant improvements in the efficiency of construction regulation as measured by Doing Business. The tradeoff has been an increase in regulatory cost”, reads the report.
Economies in Europe and Central Asia continued an active program of reforms to improve their business climate, to create jobs and spur growth, according to the report’s 15th anniversary edition.
“Doing Business 2018: Reforming to Create Jobs” records 44 reforms in the region in the past year, bringing to a total of 673 the number of reforms enacted over the past 15 years.
