Casablanca, Morocco (TMT)- Morocco ranked 3rd in Africa in the 2017 (5th in Africa in 2016) World Bank Doing Business report, including ranking 68th globally, systematically improving its 2016 global ranking by 7 notches up.
The report was released yesterday and unveiled Mauritius as the best country in Africa (49 globally) in doing business for the year 2017, followed by Rwanda (56th globally).
Botswana came in fourth place (71nd globally), followed by South Africa (74nd globally).
The top 10 most favorable countries in the world for doing Business in 2017, according to the report, are New Zealand, followed by Singapore (2nd), Denmark (3rd), Hong Kong SAR (4th), China (5th); South Korea (6th), Norway (7th), United Kingdom (8th), United States (9th), 82.45, and Sweden (10th).
The report stressed that “Morocco made the process of starting a business easier by introducing an online platform to reserve a company name and reducing registration fees.”
“Morocco made registering property easier by streamlining the property registration process,” the report further noted.
The report went on to say that the kingdom’s “credit bureau began to provide credit scores” and that it “strengthened minority investor protections by clarifying ownership and control structures and by requiring greater corporate transparency.”
Regarding trading across borders, the report stressed that “Morocco reduced the time for border compliance for importing by further developing its single window system.”
Also, the report noted that Morocco ” improved online procedures,” “increased administrative efficiency,” “expanded shareholders’ role in company management,” “improved electronic submission and processing of documents for imports,” and “introduced greater requirements for corporate transparency into their laws and regulations. Such laws promote detailed disclosure of primary employment, appointments and remuneration of directors, ensure detailed and advance notice of general meetings of shareholders, oblige members of limited liability companies to meet at least once per year and allow shareholders to add items to the meeting agenda,” which resulted in an improvement in the scores of Morocco’s economy on the corporate transparency index of the report.
The Moroccan Times.
