Armenia has moved up by 5 ranks in the World Bank Group’s Doing Business 2017: Equal Opportunity for All report, taking the 38th place on the list of 190 countries.

Armenia has facilitated business making in two spheres indicated in the report: access to credit and enforcing contracts.

In particular, Armenia strengthened access to credit, adopting new law on transaction security, which established a modern and unified collateral registry, and improved its credit information system by adopting a new law on personal data protection.

Armenia also made enforcing contracts easier by introducing a consolidated chapter regulating voluntary mediation and by establishing financial incentives for the parties to attempt mediation.

Armenia improved its “distance to frontier score” (DTF) score by 1.47 points, moving up to 73.63% from last year’s 72.16%.

DTF shows each economy’s distance to frontier score for regulatory efficiency, which has been included in the report since 2005 as the best score for all indicators of the economies reviewed in the report.

This year’s Doing Business report leaders are New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Four economies of the region – Kazakhstan (on the place 35), Belarus (37), Serbia (47) and Georgia (16) place among top 10 improvers, based on reforms undertaken.

Russia took the 40th place in the report, and Azerbaijan took the 65th.

“Europe and Central Asia has consistently been the region with the highest average number of reforms per economy and it is moving towards having the same good practices in place as the high-income economies,” noted Rita Ramalho, Manager of the Doing Business project.

For the first time, this year’s report gives prominence to gender equality issues, expanding three indicators—starting a business, registering property and enforcing contracts. Europe and Central Asia are the only regions where women face no obstacles in the spheres reviewed by the report – in every economy of the region women can start a business the same as men.