Indonesia’s positive performance in the 2017 edition was attributed to government efforts to simplify and remove unnecessary regulations. Today, Rodrigo Chaves, World Bank Country Director for Indonesia, complimented the Indonesian government for successfully raising efforts to enhance the quality of the nation’s business environment for the private sector.

He added that it is now easier to establish a business in Indonesia, have access to electricity, register property, acquire finance, pay taxes, to engage in cross-border trade and establish contracts. These are all considered key issues. For example, on average, it now takes 58 days for a company in Indonesia to connect to the nation’s power grid (it used to be 78 days). The improvement is particularly felt in Jakarta and Surabaya, the two biggest industrial cities of Indonesia.

Other examples of government efforts of policies that supported Indonesia’s jump in the ranking are the encouragement of the use of online systems, the scrapping of the paid-in minimum capital requirement for small and medium-size enterprises, the introduction of simpler customs documents and a dedicated procedure for commercial litigation and small claims.

Despite the improvement in the latest edition, Indonesian Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs Darmin Nasution said Indonesia needs to assign a special team that is tasked to monitor Indonesia’s ease of doing business in order to attract more private investment.

Other countries, besides Indonesia, that made a strong jump in the 2017 edition of the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index are Bahrain, Belarus, Brunei Darussalam, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Pakistan, Serbia and United Arab Emirates. The report noted that developing countries carried out more than 75 percent of all 283 detected reforms in the past year, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for more than one-quarter of the total.

source: indonesia-investment.com