September 2008 - According to Doing Business 2009, the sixth in an annual series of reports published by IFC and the World Bank, regulatory reform speeds up in Middle East and North Africa (MENA). For a fifth year, the region’s most popular area for reform is business start-up, with nine economies making improvements. The next most popular area for reform, credit bureau enhancements that improve access to credit, saw activity in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and the West Bank and Gaza. What is Doing Business? Doing Business ranks economies based on 10 indicators of business regulation that record the time and cost to meet government requirements in starting and operating a business, trading across borders, paying taxes, and closing a business. The rankings do not reflect such areas as macroeconomic policy, quality of infrastructure, currency volatility, investor perceptions, or crime rates.
| “Economies need rules that are efficient, easy to use, and accessible to all who use them. Otherwise, businesses are trapped in the unregulated, informal economy, where they have less access to finance and hire fewer workers and where workers lack the protection of labor law,” said Michael Klein, World Bank/IFC Vice President for Financial and Private Sector Development. |
Doing Business 2009 ranks 181 economies on the overall ease of doing business.
The top 25 are, in order, Singapore, New Zealand, the United States, Hong Kong (China), Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Norway, Iceland, Japan, Thailand, Finland, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Bahrain, Belgium, Malaysia, Switzerland, Estonia, Korea, Mauritius, and Germany.
Morocco has introduced three major reforms
The report shows that Morocco has made good progress on improving administrative procedures, but has a relatively low score in the adequacy of the legal framework to the needs for economic development. Morocco has guaranteed the right of borrowers to verify information on their creditworthiness, giving them the means to verify the accuracy of information used by financial institutions to establish their degree of risk.
Morocco also reduced the tax rate on corporate income from 35% to 30% in 2008.
Morocco has simplified the documentation required for import /export, reducing the time to import 1 day.
Thus, the country is relatively well placed in the indicators regarding entrepreneurship, obtaining administrative approval and import/export. Important progress has been made in several key areas for investment, and which are not captured by the Doing Business indicators. But a lot is still to be done... Morocco remains, however, low ranked in indicators related to the labor code, protection of minority shareholders in commercial companies rights, collateral law, commercial courts functioning, and the Code of Civil Procedure. Morocco has thus significant space for improving the regulation of business and for consolidating the current dynamism of its economy. It is important to note that several recent reforms will be reflected in future editions of Doing Business. These include: The creation of a "Credit Bureau" to improve information on borrowers,
The new law on limited liability companies which should be implemented with the adoption of decrees and circulars,
Modernization of the "Centre Regional Investment",
The regional declination of Doing Business indicators,
The government has also adopted a more comprehensive reform in particular through the pillar "business environment" of the new strategy "Émergence".
These initiatives will help create better conditions for business development and enhance the dynamism and the program of economic reforms. >> More Data on Morocco Aggregate rankings in MENA region (June 2007- June 2008) 
>> More Data on Morocco and MENA region (PDF) |
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