Oman retains first place in Arab World on World Bank's Starting Business Index

Muscat: For the second year in a row, the Sultanate has been ranked first in the Arab world on the index of starting a business in the report of Doing Business 2018 issued by the World Bank.
The Sultanate’s global ranking on the index is thirty-first.
This is attributed to the measures taken by the Sultanate last year to encourage businesses and investors, including the cancellation of the company’s capital requirement at the beginning of registration, the cancellation of Article 5 and Article 11 of the Commercial Agencies Law, and the provision of 76 e-services through the Invest portal.
The National Competitiveness Office explained that the Sultanate ranked first in the Gulf on Trading across borders index with 79.39 points, indicating that this index measures many procedures, including the cost of export and import.
With regard to the index of getting electricity, the National Competitiveness Office indicates that Oman ranked third in the Gulf and advanced to the sixty-first rank in the world from the sixty-ninth last year.
The Sultanate ranked third in the GCC countries in the resolving insolvency index.
In terms of the paying taxes index, the World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2018 indicated that the Sultanate ranked 11th in the world and advanced from 12th place last year.
The Sultanate’s rank in the registering property Index has fallen from its 35th place in the world to 54th as a result of increasing the cost of property registration from 3 per cent of the average value of the building to 5 per cent.
The Sultanate’s rank also declined in the enforcing contracts index from sixty to sixty-seventh in the current report because of no change in the procedures for this indicator.
The National Competitiveness Office explained that the Sultanate ranked third in the Gulf and seventy-first globally in the 2018 Doing Business Report, which is a series of annual reports issued by the World Bank Group. The report targets measuring trade regulations and protecting comparable property rights across 190 economies.
The report includes regulations that affect doing business in ten sub-indices: Starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency.