PH slips to 113th place in Doing Business Report 2018

The report noted that the Philippines made reforms to ease doing business in indicators such as Getting Electricity and Paying Taxes. (Pixabay photo)

MANILA— The Philippines has landed at 113th place out of 190 economies in the Doing Business Report 2018 of the World Bank.

In this year’s Doing Business Report, the country’s distance to frontier (DTF) or its gap from the best performing economy increased by 0.42 percentage points to 58.74 from 58.32 in the previous year.

The World Bank report measures the ease of doing business in an economy using 11 indicator sets that matter for entrepreneurship including Starting a Business, Dealing with Construction Permits, Getting Electricity, Registering Property, Getting Credit, Protecting Minority Investors, Paying Taxes, Trading across Borders, Enforcing Contracts, Resolving Insolvency, and Labor Market Regulation.

The report noted that the Philippines made reforms to ease doing business in indicators such as Getting Electricity and Paying Taxes.

“The Philippines reduced the time to get an electricity connection by implementing a new asset management system and by creating a new scheduling and planning office,” the Doing Business 2018 read.

“The Philippines made paying taxes easier by introducing a new electronic system for payment and collection of housing development fund contributions,” the report added.

The country also improved its DTF on indicators such as Starting a Business, up by 0.02 percentage points; Dealing with Construction Permits, up by 0.19 percentage points; and Registering Property, up by 0.01 percentage points.

Four indicators have stable DTF this year from the last report, which include Getting Credit, Protecting Minority Investors, Trading across Borders, and Enforcing Contracts.

DTF on Resolving Insolvency indicator declined by 0.02 percentage points from last year.

However, in terms of ranking, it went down by 14 notches from 99th place in last year’s report.

Among the 10 ASEAN member states, the Philippines’ ranking is only better than Cambodia at rank 135, Lao PDR at rank 141, and Myanmar at rank 171.

Rankings of six other ASEAN countries are better than the Philippines — Singapore at 2nd place; Malaysia at 24th place; Thailand at 26th place; Brunei Darussalam at 56th place; Vietnam at 68th place; and Indonesia at 72nd place.