Doing Business Report: World Bank Ranks Nigeria 147

The World Bank, in its ease of doing business report released Tuesday and titled “Doing Business 2014: Understanding Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises”, ranked Nigeria 147 of 189 countries surveyed. The report looks at ten indicators, including business registration, electricity, protecting investors, registering property, getting credit, enforcing contracts and paying taxes; the report also puts into account the country’s population and per capita GDP. Nigeria fell nine places from 138 that it was ranked in 2012, with negatives in categories of paying taxes, protecting investors, getting credit, starting a business and dealing with construction permits. Nigeria however, moved up in trading across borders and enforcing contracts categories, while it remained in the same spot for resolving insolvency. The report places Nigeria at 46.62% for Distance to Frontier (DTF) measure, up from 46.33% in 2012.  The distance to frontier (DTF) measure shows the distance of each economy to the “frontier,” which represents the highest performance observed on each of the topics including Getting Electricity across all economies included in Doing Business. An economy’s distance to frontier is indicated on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the lowest performance and 100 the frontier.