Armenia ranks 47th among 190 economies covered in the Doing Business 2020 report published today, as opposed to the 41st place given by the previous annual report.

“On the ease of doing business score which assesses a country’s absolute level of regulatory performance - Armenia’s score went up from 73.2 in Doing Business 2019 to 74.5 in Doing Business 2020,” said 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,” she added.

The report highlights that in 2018-2019, Armenia implemented four reforms improving the business regulatory framework. More specifically, Doing Business finds that Armenia implemented substantive improvements in the local regulatory framework in the following areas:

- Armenia strengthened construction quality control by imposing stricter qualification requirements for architects and engineers;  

- Armenia strengthened minority investor protections by requiring an independent review and immediate disclosure to the public of related party transactions, increasing shareholders’ rights and role in major corporate decisions and clarifying ownership and control structures;

- Armenia made paying taxes easier by extending value added tax cash refunds to cases of capital investment;

- Armenia made exporting faster by allowing the online submission of customs declarations.

Also, the Doing Business team visited Yerevan this year and deepened its knowledge across topics in Armenia by expanding the pool of contributors over the past year to 139 (by 8%) located in Yerevan.

New Zealand, Singapore and Hong-Kong top the ranking in this year’s report.

The ranking of other countries of the region apart from Armenia is as follows: Georgia – 7, Turkey – 33, Azerbaijan – 34, Iran – 127.

Russia is ranked at 28.