Armenia improves its performance in Doing Business 2019 report, ranked 41st

Armenia has improved its performance and has been ranked 41st in the Doing Business 2019 report, head of the World Bank Yerevan office Sylvie Bossoutrot  said, presenting the report.

She noted that Armenia has improved its position with 6 points as last year it was ranked 47th among the 190 countries.

Sylvie Bossoutrot said that an important indicator to look at is what they used to call in previous report the distance to frontier metric which was renamed in this report the ease of doing business score which she said was done to better reflect the main purpose.

“The purpose is to measure country’ s absolute progress towards what we call best practices. The ease of doing business score assesses a country’s absolute level of business regulatory performance on the scale from zero to one hundred, where zero represents the lowest performance and 100 the best performance,” she said.

Bossoutrot also noted that this year Armenia has improved its ease of doing business score by two points, going from  73.31 last year to 75.37 this year which confirms the positive trajectory.

The head of the office also said that Armenia has eased staring business by allowing voluntary VAT registration at the time of business incorporation.

“In practical terms this means that with a new Tax Code that became effective in January an option was introduced for companies to voluntary register as VAT payers,” she stressed, adding that as a result three and half days is demanded for registering a business in Armenia instead of former 4 and a half which makes Armenia the eight best performer in the world with this indicator.