Acting RA Minister of Economic Development and Investments Tigran Khachatryan and Country Manager of the World Bank for Armenia Sylvie Bossourot presented WB's «Doing Business 2019» report, on October 31.

This year, Armenia is ranked 41st in the ease of doing ranking, compared to the last year's 47. The main reasons for the progress in the previously published ranking are the improvements in business regulation environment.

In 2017/18, Armenia implemented 5 reforms that improved the business regulatory framework – matching the historical record for Armenia since the beginning of the Doing Business project. More specifically, Doing Business finds that Armenia introduced substantive improvements in the following areas:

• Starting a business was made easier by allowing voluntary value added tax registration at the time of business incorporation;

• Getting electricity was made faster by imposing new deadlines for procedures to obtain a new electrical connection;

• Minority investor protections were strengthened by increasing disclosure of related-party transactions, clarifying ownership and control structures and requiring greater corporate transparency;

• Paying taxes was made easier by introducing administrative measures to ease compliance with corporate income tax, value added tax and labor tax rules;

• Enforcing contracts was made easier by introducing a simplified procedure for small claims and time standards for key court events.

Acting RA Minister of Economic Development and Investments Tigran Khachatryan mentioned that despite the recorded improvement the Government will intensify its efforts to improve the indicators.

"We intend to raise the rating from the average of all indicators that relate to the regulation of issues, and in the long run we plan to be included at least in the top ten of those indicators," he said.

"The presented data also tell us what steps we should take to make business and investment environments more favorable in Armenia, on the path to further economic growth and its equal distribution in society," Tigran Khachatryan said.

“On the distance to frontier metric - which assesses a country’s absolute level of regulatory performance on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the lowest performance and 100 represents the frontier - Armenia’s score went from 73.31 in Doing Business 2018 to 75.37 in Doing Business 2019,” says Sylvie Bossoutrot, World Bank Country Manager for Armenia. “This means that over the course of last year Armenia has improved its business regulations as captured by the Doing Business indicators in absolute terms. The country is indeed continuing to narrow the gap with the global regulatory frontier which is a positive and promising development.”

The full report and its datasets are available at www.doingbusiness.org