Armenia went down by 9 ranks in World Bank Group’s annual Doing Business report, ranking at 47 instead of last year’s 38.

The WB office in Armenia noted that the main reasons behind this change with respect to the previously published ranking are the significant improvements in other economies’ business regulatory environments, methodology refinements and data revisions.

“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 71.92 in Doing Business 2017 to 72.51 in Doing Business 2018,” said Sylvie Bossoutrot, WB Country Manager for Armenia. “This means that over the course of last year Armenia 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 development.”

More specifically, Doing Business finds that Armenia implemented substantive changes in the local regulatory framework in the following areas in 2016/17:

- Armenia made getting electricity easier by imposing new deadlines for connection procedures and introducing anew geographic information system at the utility;
-  Armenia made registering property easier by improving the land administration system’s dispute resolution mechanisms.

The leaders of this year’s Doing Business are New Zealand, Singapore and Denmark.

Other countries of the region have the following ranking: Georgia is in the 9th place, Azerbaijan in the 57th, Turkey in the 60th, and Iran in the 124th.

Russia ranks at 35 in the report, rising from last year’s 40.