Turkey greatly improved its position in this year’s ranking of countries by ease of doing business.
The World Bank put Turkey 33rd in its Doing Business 2020 ranking published Thursday. Turkey jumped 10 places compared to last year. The report took into account reforms implemented between May 2018 and May 2019.
The Doing Business study analyzes business regulations and their enforcement, looks at domestic small and medium-sized companies, and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle.
The research focuses on five main areas: opening a business, getting a location, accessing finance, dealing with day-to-day operations and operating in a secure business environment.
According to the study, in 2018/19 Turkey especially improved in two areas — registering property and paying taxes.
“Turkey made property registration less expensive by temporarily reducing mortar charges to transfer property, and faster by reducing the time to obtain a tax assessment,” the report said.
“Turkey made paying taxes easier by amending the value added tax code to exempt certain capital investments from value added tax,” it added.
Commenting on the report, Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak hailed Turkey’s improvement over the last year.
“We will continue our reforms. We will improve on our gains in areas such as starting business, tax payment and foreign trade. Securing an increase in business efficiency, we will take Turkey's investment climate to the highest level,” Albayrak tweeted.
Turkey ranked the highest in protecting minority investors (21st in the world), enforcing contracts (24th), paying taxes (26th) and registering property (27th).
Turkey scored 76.8 points out of 100 this year, same as France.
New Zealand was named the easiest country to do business in for the fourth straight year, scoring 86.8 points, closely followed by Singapore (86.2), Hong Kong and Denmark (both 85.3).
Last year, the Turkish government implemented seven reforms to improve the business climate in the country, helping it surge 17 places in Doing Business 2019 to enter the top 10 improvers list.