Your trusted source

Armenia ranks 47th among 190 countries in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2020 report. New Zealand was named the easiest place to do business in for the fourth year in a row, followed by Singapore, Hong Kong and Denmark.

“On the ease of doing business score which assesses a country’s absolute level of regulatory performance - Armenia’s score went up from 73.2 in Doing Business 2019 to 74.5 in Doing Business 2020,” says Sylvie Bossoutrot, World Bank Country Manager for Armenia. “This means that over the course of last year Armenia has improved its business regulations as captured by the Doing Business indicators in absolute terms. The country is indeed continuing to narrow the gap with the global regulatory frontier which is a positive and promising development.”

In 2018/19, Armenia implemented four reforms improving the business regulatory framework, the World Bank office in Yerevan reported. More specifically, Doing Business finds that Armenia implemented substantive improvements in the local regulatory framework in the following areas:

• Armenia strengthened construction quality control by imposing stricter qualification requirements for architects and engineers; 
• Armenia strengthened minority investor protections by requiring an independent review and immediate disclosure to the public of related party transactions, increasing shareholders’ rights and role in major corporate decisions and clarifying ownership and control structures;
• Armenia made paying taxes easier by extending value added tax cash refunds to cases of capital investment;
• Armenia made exporting faster by allowing the online submission of customs declarations.

Also, the Doing Business team visited Yerevan this year and deepened its knowledge across topics in Armenia by expanding the pool of contributors over the past year to 139 (by 8%) located in Yerevan.

The region implemented the most reforms world-wide in the areas of paying taxes (nine), as 22 economies in the region now allow electronic filing of taxes, and enforcing contracts (six), as Europe and Central Asian is the region with the most efficient commercial judicial system.  Europe and Central Asian economies also stand out on the ease of registering property: it costs 2.7% of property value on average to transfer a property, less than the 4.2% average among OECD high-income economies.

Economies in Europe and Central Asia accelerated an already strong momentum to improve their business climates, enacting 56 reforms and leading globally in reforms on paying taxes and enforcing contracts, the Doing Business 2020 study says.