Nov 2014 Financial News

Drop in ranking a concern (Barbados)

Nov 04, 2014

Barbados’ drop in the World Bank’s Doing Business ranking may indicate a need to look at regional neighbours who are recording success in the area.

This is because, while this island has recorded a three-point drop to 106 in the ease of doing business standings, Jamaica has now risen higher from a ranking of 84 in 2014, to 58 in 2015 in the survey.

“We are in the bottom half globally in terms of ease of doing business. Of the 13 economies in the region, we are ranked at number ten, which is down two places from last year. We have actually been overtaken in the rankings by the Dominican Republic and Jamaica,” explained Vice-President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Barbados Andrew Brathwaite, indicating that these have jumped to number four and two in the Caribbean rankings respectively.

Stating that the island must take a look at the two countries to see what they have been doing, he also suggested that there may be lessons to learn from the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programme for Jamaica, “without having to be in a formal adjustment programme ourselves”.

Breaking down the categories, he pointed out that under the ‘Dealing with Construction Permits’ area, it took Barbados 442 days to go through the process compared with the regional average of 178.3 days and 149.5 days within the OECD.

“What is pushing up the time in Barbados is that it is estimated that it takes 270 days to get permission from Town and Country Planning Department and it takes 114 days to receive a certificate of compliance if you are doing construction projects. We may get into a debate about are those numbers accurate, but definitely there is a lot of room for improvement there,” he stressed.

In the ‘Registering Property’ category on average this takes 118 days, according to the report, compared to the regional average of 63 days and the OECD’s average of 24 days.

“[Therefore] those two steps alone are 150 days compared to the average of the total process in the OECD of 24 days. We can clearly utilise these benchmarks to try and improve in terms of our business facilitation,” he added.

Brathwaite made the comments while addressing a press conference yesterday at the institute’s Hastings office. (JMB)

Source:
Barbados Advocate
Tuesday November 4, 2014

http://www.barbadosadvocate.com/newsitem.asp?more=business&NewsID=39723