Kuala Lumpur, October 26, 2016 – Malaysia continued its efforts to improve the business climate for local entrepreneurs, enacting two business reforms during the past year, says the World Bank Group’s latest Doing Business report.
Released today Doing Business 2017: Equal Opportunity for All, finds that Malaysia is one of 17 economies that implemented reforms in the East Asia and the Pacific region in the past year.
The two reforms implemented in the past year included the strengthening of credit reporting by providing consumer credit scores. With this change, Malaysia has attained a perfect score on the depth of credit information index of the Doing Business indicator of Getting Credit.
Malaysia also made it easier to pay taxes by introducing an online system for filing and paying goods and services tax. Now, it takes a medium-sized company only 9 payments to comply with taxes, versus 13 payments in the previous year.
Malaysia continues to maintain its strong performance in several Doing Business areas. It continues to be among the top 15 performers globally in Dealing with Construction Permits. It takes only 79 days to complete all requirements for obtaining a construction permit, compared to the global average 156 days. Malaysia also retains its spot this year as the third best economy in the world in terms of protecting minority investors. For example, Malaysia sets the best practice in terms of information that companies must share in order to enter into transactions with interested parties.
Furthermore, Malaysia is one of the top 10 economies in the world in terms of Getting Electricity. It takes 31 days to get connected to the electrical grid in Malaysia, compared to the average 76 days in the OECD high-income region.
In the Doing Business global ranking stakes, Malaysia is in 23rd place.
“The Malaysian government is steadily working towards improving its business regulatory environment.” said Faris H. Hadad-Zervos, Country Manager, World Bank Group Global Knowledge and Research Hub in Malaysia. “It is encouraging to see the economy continue to implement reforms that ease the process of doing business for entrepreneurs.”
This year, the Doing Business report considers gender-related aspects for three sets of indicators: Starting a Business, Registering Property and Enforcing Contracts.
The Paying Taxes indicator set has been expanded as well to include measures of post-filing processes relating to tax audits and tax refunds. Malaysia performs well on this measure. For example, it takes about 5 hours to comply with a corporate income tax audit – compared to the regional average of 18 hours.
The full report and accompanying datasets are available at https://www.doingbusiness.org/.
