Doing Business Report: Switzerland slips back in the ranking

The World Bank’s Doing Business project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies. The report captures several important dimensions of the regulatory environment as it applies to local firms. It provides quantitative indicators on regulation for starting a business, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency.

The report for 2019 has been published this week. Overall Switzerland ranks 38th. Over the last year, the rank has worsened. Switzerland slipped from position 26 to 31, then to 33 and now to 38.

Regarding the subindex “starting a business”, the situation is even worse. This topic measures the number of procedures, time, cost and paid-in minimum capital requirement for a small- to medium-sized limited liability company to start up and formally operate in each economy’s largest business city. In the report for 2019, Switzerland occupies 77th position. Three years ago Switzerland ranked 69th. 

Switzerland implemented some reforms such as introducing online procedures for starting a business. However, other countries are far more active. Last year governments around the world set a new record in bureaucracy bursting efforts for the domestic private sector, implementing 314 business reforms over the past year, says the World Bank Group’s Doing Business 2019 report. The reforms, carried out in 128 economies, benefit small and medium enterprises as well as entrepreneurs. This year’s reforms surpassed the previous all-time high of 290 reforms two years ago.

In the World Bank Group’s annual ease of doing business rankings, the top 10 economies are New Zealand, Singapore and Denmark, which retained their first, second and third spots, respectively, for a second consecutive year. The top 3 countries are followed by Hong Kong SAR, China; Republic of Korea; Georgia; Norway; United States; the United Kingdom and FYR Macedonia.