Doing business in UAE becomes easier: World Bank

The UAE’s push towards becoming the world’s most efficient country is persistently being rewarded with the latest World Bank Report released on Wednesday showing that the emirate’s ranking jumped one place to 22nd worldwide for ‘Ease of Doing Business’.

The UAE maintained its top position among the Middle East countries. Among the Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia plunged from 26th position in 2014 to 49th in 2015 ranking. Qatar ranked third in region and 50th worldwide followed by Bahrain at 53rd, Oman at 66th and Kuwait at 86th.

The top 10 position was obtained by Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Denmark, Korea, Norway, US, UK, Finland and Australia.

The UAE took a number of steps related to registering property, getting credit and protecting minority investors’ interests that helped the emirate to improve its ranking.

Among the 21 economies with the most reforms making it easier to do business in 2013/14, 10 stood out as having improved the most in performance on the Doing Business indicators: Tajikistan, Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, the Republic of Congo, Azerbaijan, Ireland and the UAE.

The UAE made transferring property easier by introducing new service centres and a standard contract for property transactions.

The emirate also strengthened minority investor protections by introducing additional approval requirements for related-party transactions and greater requirements for disclosure of such transactions to the stock exchange; by introducing a requirement that interested directors be held liable in a related-party transaction that is unfair or constitutes a conflict of interest; and by making it possible for shareholders to inspect the documents pertaining to a related-party transaction, appoint auditors to inspect the transaction and request a rescission of the transaction if it should prove to be unfair.

In the UAE, the credit bureau improved access to credit information by starting to exchange credit information with a utility.

Reforms making it easier to get credit were also undertaken at the national level. In the UAE, the credit bureau Emcredit and the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) began exchanging credit information in October 2013. As a result, the credit bureau can now identify customers with unpaid Dewa accounts beyond 90 days and the utility has access to the bureau’s bounced check repository.
 

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