Recent reforms improved our position and helped sustain our position as the most business friendly location in our region.

The Ease of Doing Business Index is an index created by the World Bank. Higher rankings indicate better, usually simpler, regulations for businesses and stronger protections of property rights. The index is based on the study of laws and regulations, with the input and verification by more than 5,000 government officials, lawyers, business consultants, accountants and other professionals who routinely advise on or administer legal and regulatory requirements.

The Ease of Doing Business index is meant to measure regulations directly affecting businesses. A nation’s ranking on the index is based on the average of 10 subindices:

1. Starting a business – Procedures, time, cost and minimum capital to open a new business

2. Dealing with licenses – Procedures, time and cost of business inspections and licensing (construction industry)

3. Hiring and firing workers – Difficulty of hiring index, rigidity of hours of index, difficulty of firing index, hiring cost and firing cost

4. Registering property – Procedures, time and cost to register commercial real estate

5. Getting credit – Strength of legal rights index, depth of credit information index

6. Protecting investors – Indices on the extent of disclosure, extent of director liability and ease of shareholder suits

7. Paying taxes – Number of taxes paid, hours per year spent preparing tax returns and total tax payable as share of gross profit

8. Trading across borders – Number of documents, number of signatures and time necessary to export and import

9. Enforcing contracts – Procedures, time and cost to enforce a debt contract

10. Closing a business – Time and cost to close down a business, and recovery rate

11. The World Bank Ease of Doing Business Report on Pakistan is downloadable here.