Singapore retained its top ranking with the highest consolidated scores followed by New Zealand and Hong Kong on the second and third positions, respectively, in the World Bank Doing Business Report 2015.

World Bank released its latest Doing Business – 2015 report that measures the ease of doing business in 189 economies based on 11 business-related regulations, including business start-up, getting credit, getting electricity, and trading across borders.

According to KIPCO Asset Management Co (KAMCO) the report, however, does not cover the full breadth of business concerns, such as security, macroeconomic stability, or corruption and many other dimensions of the business environment also matter but are outside the scope of the report.

This year’s report, “Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency,” uses new data and methodology in three areas: resolving insolvency, protecting minority investors, and getting credit. Accordingly, previous year rankings have been realigned to the new methodology as reflected in the below table which highlights rankings of selected economies.

As per the report, the rankings of the top seven economies for ease of doing business remained unchanged. The report also highlighted that entrepreneurs in 123 economies saw improvements in their local regulatory framework last year.

Between June 2013 and June 2014, the report documented 230 business reforms, with 145 reforms aimed at reducing the complexity and cost of complying with business regulation, and 85 reforms aimed at strengthening legal institutions. The Sub-Saharan Africa region accounted for the largest number of such reforms. The region also accounts for the largest number of regulatory reforms making it easier to do business in the past year—75 of the 230 worldwide. Meanwhile, Europe and Central Asia had both the largest share of economies making it easier to do business in 2013/14 and the biggest average improvement in distance to frontier scores.