If you were a small business owner in 2009 who was interested in registering a new property in Warsaw, Poland you could expect to wait 197 days to complete this task. If you were thinking of perhaps building a new property for this business, your expected wait time for a construction would have been 308 days.
Fast forward five years and you now find a drastically different business climate. Today, the average time necessary to register a property now stands at a drastically reduced 35 days, while the expected wait for a construction permit has been nearly halved, down to 161 days. These improvements have helped local businesses thrive in the country, steadily pushing Poland up in the annual Doing Business report - from 72 in 2010 to 45 in 2014.
While these improvements in ranking illustrate the large economic strides that Poland has made in recent years as it continues on its path of convergence with the European Union, their limited scope also forces them to paint a picture as it exists only in Warsaw and not the country as a whole - businesses and entrepreneurs living outside of the nation’s capital to merely speculate about the actual ease of doing business in their respective communities.
With the recent announcement of a subnational Doing Business launch, however, this situation is now set to change. In approximately one year from now, a Polish entrepreneur interested in learning about the business climate outside of Warsaw will also be able to find out how much time he or she can expect to start a business or register a property. A small business owner in Lublin will have information about enforcing a contract and an entrepreneur can learn about dealing with construction permits in Opole by turning to the data from the Doing Business in Poland report, expected to be released in the Spring of 2015.
“Thanks to our research, companies and local authorities will have first-hand, reliable information,” noted co-author and World Bank Economist Marcin Piatkowski in a recent interview following the announcement of this new report.