Guyana has been ranked 114th out of 185 countries assessed in terms of ease of doing business, maintaining its score of 114 from the 2012 assessment, according to the World Bank’s Doing Business 2013 report released on Tuesday.
According to the report, Guyana is classified as a lower middle income country with a gross national income per capita of US$3,202 and a population of 800,000. For the 2011 report, Guyana was ranked 113. By contrast, this year Trinidad was ranked 69, Barbados 88 and Jamaica 90.
The report said that with regards to starting a business, Guyana has a total of eight procedures which take 20 days to be completed. Cost in terms of income per capital is 20 percent, the report states. The country is ranked 148 in terms of getting electricity, which requires seven procedures and 109 days. Cost of electricity as a percentage of income per capita is 542 percent.
The score Guyana earned for registering a property is 114, as it entails six procedures that require 75 days to process at a cost of 4.6 percent of the value of the property.
For getting credit, Guyana ranked 167. The report said that on a scale of 1 – 10 of the strength of legal rights index, Guyana scored 4. For depth of credit information, Guyana scored 0 out of 6.
In terms of protecting investors, Guyana received a rank of 82 and on the strength of investor index, Guyana scored 5.3 out of 10. It scored 6 out of 10 on the ease of shareholder index.
The country ranked 118 in terms of payment of taxes, with the tax rate as a percentage of profit being 36.1 percent, which takes up 263 hours per year to pay.
With regards to cross border trade, Guyana ranked 84. It takes 19 days to process exports and it costs US$730 to export one container. A total of seven documents are required for exports from Guyana. The cost to import a container to Guyana is US$745 and it takes 22 days to do so.
Guyana ranked 75 in terms of enforcing contracts. The procedures to do so number 36 and it takes 581 days to complete. The cost to do so is 25.2 percent of the claim. Guyana ranked 138 with regards to resolving insolvency.
The report said resolving insolvency in Guyana take years and the cost is 29 percent of the estate. Recovery rate in terms of cents on the dollar is 17.6.
The report in its introduction said that economies that rank highest on the ease of doing business are not those where there is no regulation—“but those where governments have managed to create rules that facilitate interactions in the marketplace without needlessly hindering the development of the private sector.” It said, “In essence, Doing Business is about SMART business regulations—Streamlined, Meaningful, Adaptable, Relevant, Transparent—not necessarily fewer regulations.”
The top scorers in the 2013 Doing Business report are Singapore (1), Hong Kong (2), New Zealand (3), United States (4), Denmark (5) and Norway (6). Those at the bottom are Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Chad and Central African Republic.
