Lijeng Ranooe
THE World Bank has ranked Lesotho 10th on the list of African countries in its recent Ease of Doing Business 2018 report.
The report indicates that Lesotho has a Distance to Frontier (DTF) score of 60.42 and is ranked 104 in the world.
According to the World Bank Group website, the DTF score helps assess the absolute level of regulatory performance over time. It measures the distance of each economy to the frontier, which represents the best performance observed on each of the indicators across all economies. An economy’s DTF is reflected on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the lowest performance and 100 represents the frontier.
The Doing Business report indicates that Lesotho is in the 49th position for trading across borders, 77th for getting credit, 95th for enforcing contracts, 111th for paying taxes, 108th for protecting minority investors and 119th for starting business.
It also named Europe and Central Asia, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa as the regions with the highest share of reforming economies.
“Among the economies of Sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritius has the highest distance to frontier score of 77.54, while Somalia has the lowest on 19.98,” the report said.
The report captured 264 business regulation reforms across the 10-measured indicator sets. As in previous years, Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest number of reforms (83), followed by East Asia and the Pacific with 45 and Europe and Central Asia with 44.
The regions with the highest share of reforming economies are Europe and Central Asia (79%), South Asia (75%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (79%).
Doing Business measures aspects of regulation affecting 11 areas of the life of a business. 10 areas are included in this year’s ranking on the ease of doing business namely, starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency.
The report also measures features of labour market regulation, which is not included in this year’s ranking.
