Montenegro goes up in Doing Business 2014, ranks 44th out of 189 global economies

Podgorica, Montenegro (29 October 2013) – Montenegro moves up to 44th place overall in the Doing Business 2014 world ranking list including 189 countries, the World Bank announced today in its annual report.

According to the report, Montenegro implemented most notable reforms in the areas of “issuing construction permits” and “property registration”.

In the area of “issuing construction permits”, legal amendments of July 2011 that introduced, among other things, a one-stop shop and imposed strict time limits for the issuance of approvals, brought about an improvement in the ranking by almost 70 (from 174 to 106). This important reform decreased a number of procedures required for obtaining a permit from 16 to 9 and reduced the procedure from 267 to 158 days, Montenegro’s Finance Ministry says.

Montenegro suffered a slight decline in the areas of “investor protection” (-1), “enforcing contracts” (-1) and “resolving issue of insolvency” (-1).

Although neither of the three indicators changed in regard to the previous report (time, costs, and procedures), other countries covered in the report achieved more notable progress and Montenegro fell by one place in each category.

Montenegro saw a drop in ranking in the fields of “starting a business” (-11), “cross-border trade” (-11) and “paying taxes” (-5).

The decline in the field of “cross-border trade” is due to the increase in import and export costs. As regards the “paying taxes” indicator, although the overall tax rate in the procedure of company registration decreased from 1.6% to 1.5% of income per capita, and the number and duration of procedures remained unchanged, since other countries invested more efforts in reforming the indicator, no improvement for Montenegro was registered in this area.

In the region, only Macedonia (25) and Slovenia (33) rank higher than Montenegro, while Kosovo (86), Croatia (89), Albania (90), Serbia (93), Bosnia and Herzegovina (131) and rank lower, the report concludes.

Since 2008 (the 2009 Doing Business report), Montenegro has seen a constant improvement in the overall ranking, going up by more than 40 places. Full country profile available at: http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/~/media/giawb/doing%20business/documents/profiles/country/MNE.pdf?ver=2.