Vietnam drops in ease of doing business ranking: WB

According to "Doing Business 2019: Training for Reform" report published by World Bank recently, Vietnam gets 68.36 points, up 1.59 points year over year but its ease of doing business ranking fell one place to 69th among 190 economies.

Among ASEAN countries, Vietnam is in the middle level and far behind the top namely Singapore (2nd), Malaysia (15th), Thailand (27th) and Brunei (55th).

Vietnam has seven out of ten topics which score higher point but only four ones have higher ranking, including starting a business, getting electricity, registering property and resolving insolvency.

Getting electricity is the most noticeable topic that rises by 37 places in the ranking, reaching 27/190.

Despite the downgrade, Vietnam is still considered by the World Bank as a reformed economy carrying out much reforms, along with Indonesia and the Philippines. During past year, the country carried out three ones and improvements were made to make it easier to enforce contracts, pay taxes and start a business.

World Bank’s report shows that economies in the East Asia and Pacific region continued their strong reform agendas to improve the ease of doing business for domestic small and medium enterprises.

Of the region’s 25 economies, two are among the world’s top ten ranked economies namely Singapore and Hong Kong. In addition, China is among this year’s top 10 improvers. With a single-year record of seven reforms in the past year, China advanced to 46th place in the global ranking.

“East Asia and Pacific region has made significant progress in enabling entrepreneurship and private enterprise. As the reform momentum continues building up in the region, those economies which lag behind have the opportunity to learn from the good practices adopted by their neighbors,” said Rita Ramalho, Senior Manager of the World Bank’s Global Indicators Group, which produces the report.