The World Bank has released its 2017 Doing Business Report, noting that a record 137 economies around the world have adopted key reforms that make it easier to start and operate small and medium-sized businesses..
In its global country rankings of business efficiency, Doing Business 2017 awarded its coveted top spot to New Zealand, Singapore ranks second, followed by Denmark; Hong Kong SAR, China; Republic of Korea; Norway; United Kingdom; United States; Sweden; and Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
[Full Report](http://www.doingbusiness.org/~/media/WBG/DoingBusiness/Documents/Annual-Reports/English/DB17-Full-Report.pdf?cid=ECR_E_NewsletterWeekly_EN_EXT)
[World Bank Release](http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2016/10/25/record-number-of-economies-carried-out-business-reforms-in-past-year-doing-business)
**About Doing Business**
The Doing Business project, launched in 2002, provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level. It looks at domestic small and medium-size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle.
By gathering and analyzing comprehensive quantitative data to compare business regulation environments across economies and over time, Doing Business encourages economies to compete towards more efficient regulation; offers measurable benchmarks for reform; and serves as a resource for academics, journalists, private sector researchers and others interested in the business climate of each economy.
In addition, Doing Business offers detailed [subnational reports](http://www.doingbusiness.org/Reports/Subnational-Reports), which exhaustively cover business regulation and reform in different cities and regions within a nation. These reports provide data on the ease of doing business, rank each location, and recommend reforms to improve performance in each of the indicator areas. Selected cities can compare their business regulations with other cities in the economy or region and with the 190 economies that Doing Business has ranked.
The first Doing Business report, published in 2003, covered 5 indicator sets and 133 economies. This year’s report covers 11 indicator sets and 190 economies. Most indicator sets refer to a case scenario in the largest business city of each economy, except for 11 economies that have a population of more than 100 million as of 2013 (Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Russian Federation and the United States) where Doing Business, also collected data for the second largest business city. The data for these 11 economies are a population-weighted average for the 2 largest business cities. The project has benefited from feedback from governments, academics, practitioners and reviewers. The initial goal remains: to provide an objective basis for understanding and improving the regulatory environment for business around the world.