Doing Business in 2006
The following study is published annually by International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group.
“It takes 2 days to start a business in Australia, but 152 days in Brazil and 203 days in the Haiti. There are no monetary costs to start a new business in Denmark, but it costs more than two times income per capita in Cambodia and over 14 times in Zimbabwe.
Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and more than three dozen other economies require no minimum capital from start-ups. In contrast, in Syria the capital requirement is equivalent to 51 times income per capita… Businesses in the Czech Republic and Denmark can hire workers on part-time or fixed-term contracts for any job, without specifying maximum duration of the contract. In contrast, employment laws in El Salvador allow fixed-term contracts only for a specific jobs, and set their duration to be at most one year…
A simple commercial contract is enforced in 48 days in the Netherlands and 346 days in Canada, but takes almost 1,400 days in Italy. The cost of enforcement is around 10 percent of the disputed amount in Austria, Canada and the United Kingdom, but more than 100 percent in Cambodia, Indonesia and Democratic Republic of Congo…
Credit bureaus contain credit histories on almost every adult in Canada, Norway and the United States. But the credit registries in India, Jamaica, Pakistan, Nigeria and Serbia and Montenegro have credit histories for less than 1 percent of adults. In the United Kingdom, laws on collateral and bankruptcy give creditors strong powers to recover their money if a debtor defaults. In colombia, the Republic of Congo, Mexico, Oman and Tunisia, a creditor has no such rights.
It takes less than six months to go through bankruptcy proceedings in Ireland and Japan, but more than ten years in Brazil and India. It costs less than 1 percent of the value of the estate to resolve insolvency in Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Singapore – and nearly half the estate value in Chad, Panama, Macedonia, Venezuela, Serbia and Montenegro, and Sierra Leone.”
“Good regulation does not mean zero regulation,” concludes the IFC study. “The optimal level of regulation is not none, but maybe less than what is currently found in most countries, and especially poor ones.”