New Zealand Named Best Nation for Business
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 - The World Bank has concluded that New Zealand is the most business-friendly nation in the world and that Serbia and Montenegro made the biggest pro-business changes last year.
In a study to be released on Tuesday, the World Bank said that New Zealand and Singapore were the easiest countries to do business in. The United States came in third, followed by Canada.
In its report, the World Bank ranked 155 countries based on classic American assumptions about economic success, like the idea that less red tape is better than more. The study looked at factors like the number of days it takes to get approval for starting a business, the ease or difficulty of hiring and firing workers, the ability of creditors to recoup their money when a company goes bankrupt, and the ability to enforce contracts in court.
As in the past, most of those at the top of the list are wealthy and technologically advanced, like Australia, Britain, Denmark, Hong Kong and Norway. Hong Kong, a semiautonomous region of China, placed seventh, while China itself placed only 91st out of 155.
But the World Bank said the formerly communist nations of Central Europe had made some of the biggest advances in supporting private business. Two former Soviet republics - Lithuania, in 14th place, and Estonia, in 15th - ranked ahead of Switzerland, Belgium and Germany. Among the countries that made the biggest changes in 2004 were Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Latvia and Romania.
Countries that rank at the very top in terms of friendliness to business were not necessarily easy places to be a worker. The United States and New Zealand, for example, were the only two countries in the rankings that imposed no requirement at all to give severance pay to workers who had been laid off. ...
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