Latvia has risen to its current position from 22nd place last year.
The WB said that this due to methodology changes this year's report is not directly comparable to the results of Doing Business 2016, because of changes in the methodology. On a comparable metric with all adjustments made to the Doing Business 2016 data, Latvia's last year's ranking would have been 17. This still means an improvement on a year-on-year basis by three positions, the WB said.
"The most recent report indicates Latvia’s score went up from 79.14 in Doing Business 2016 to 80.61 in Doing Business 2017, using a comparable methodology.
This means that in the last year Latvia has improved its business regulations as captured by the Doing Business indicators in absolute terms - the country is narrowing the gap with best global practices," said WB economist Maciej Drozd.
Doing Business 2017 finds that Latvia implemented substantive improvements in the local regulatory framework in the following areas: better access to credit information by launching a private credit bureau; making paying taxes less complicated by improving its online systems for filing corporate income tax returns and mandatory labor contributions.
The annual World Bank Group flagship Doing Business report analyzes regulations that apply to an economy’s businesses during their life cycle, including start-up and operations, such as trading across borders, paying taxes, and resolving insolvency.
The aggregate ease of doing business rankings are based on the distance to frontier scores for 10 topics and cover 190 economies.
