Armenia is ranked at 41 in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2019 report published today, which is an improvement on last year’s 47th rank.

The main reason behind this progress is the enhanced business regulation environment, reflected in various reforms.

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 rose from 73.31in Doing Business 2018 to 75.37in Doing Business 2019.

In 2017-2018, Armenia implemented 5 reforms in business regulations, which corresponds with the ranking given to Armenia by Doing Business since the launch of the project.

In particular, the report highlights the significant improvements Armenia has achieved in the following areas:

- Armenia made starting a business easier by allowing voluntary value added tax registration at the time of business incorporation.

- Armenia made getting electricity faster by imposing new deadlines for procedures to obtain a new electrical connection.

- Armenia strengthened minority investor protections by increasing disclosure of related-party transactions, clarifying ownership and control structures and requiring greater corporate transparency.

- Armenia made paying taxes easier by introducing administrative measures to ease compliance with corporate income tax, value added tax and labor tax rules.

- Armenia made enforcing contracts easier by introducing a simplified procedure for small claims and time standards for key court events.

New Zealand, Singapore and Denmark are once again the top-ranked countries in Doing Business report.

Apart from Armenia, other countries of South Caucasus are ranked as follows: Georgia at 6, Azerbaijan at 25, Turkey at 43 and Iran at 128.

Russia is ranked at 31 in the report.