Doha, October 24, 2019 – Qatar embarked on an ambitious program to improve its business regulations, earning it a spot in the top 20 global business environment improvers, according to the World Bank Group’s Doing Business 2020 report. Qatar ranks 77 on this year’s Ease of Doing Business, an improvement from its ranking of 83rd in last year’s study.
Qatar made reforms in three business areas last year: 1) Getting Electricity, 2) Registering Property, and 3) Getting Credit. Qatar improved land registration by creating a one-stop shop and eliminating five procedures while also lowering property transfer time by 11 days. The Ministry of Justice streamlined property registration procedures and improved the quality of its land administration system by publishing official service standards and court statistics on land disputes.
"We look forward to Qatar’s continuation of this reform momentum and we are committed to supporting them with their National Development Strategy," said Issam Abousleiman, World Bank Regional Director of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Other areas of improvements include the credit bureau’s introduction of reporting credit data from a telecommunication company. Also, Kahramaa, Qatar’s water and electricity utility company, introduced a new process to receive and review applications through its online portal. This reduces the time it takes to obtain an electricity connection.
Qatar, along with all countries of the GCC, carried out reforms that help to create jobs and stimulate private enterprises, improving the region’s average of ease of doing business score by 2.9 points. These changes are motivated in part by the need for economic diversification and foreign direct investment.
Across the regions, economies in the Middle East and North Africa improved the most in Doing Business this year. Countries of the GCC carried out a record of 35 new reforms to improve the ease of doing business for their domestic enterprises, according to the Doing Business 2020 study. This is almost double the amount of reforms carried out in the previous 12-month period which was 14 reforms.
The full study and its datasets are available at www.doingbusiness.org.
