Armenia ranks 47th among 190 countries in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2020 report. New Zealand was named the easiest place to do business in for the fourth year in a row, followed by Singapore, Hong Kong and Denmark.
“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,” says 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.”
In 2018/19, Armenia implemented four reforms improving the business regulatory framework, the World Bank office in Yerevan reported. 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 inves...
