Doing Business 2015 ranks Montenegro 36th out of 189 global economies

Podgorica, Montenegro (29 October 2014) – Montenegro moves up to 36th place overall in the Doing Business 2015 world ranking list including 189 countries, the World Bank announced today in its annual report. Since 2008 (the 2009 Doing Business report), Montenegro has seen a constant improvement in the overall ranking, going up by 54 places.

This has been achieved largely due to the reforms Montenegro implemented in the area of "issuing construction permit" (reducing costs for providing utility services and eliminating compensation for issuing urban and technical permits). In this area, Montenegro moved up by 27 places, from last year's revised 167 to 138.

According to the report, Montenegro suffered a slight decline, due to changes in the calculation methodology, in the areas of “getting credit”, “paying taxes” and ”cross-border trade” (-1), “resolving issue of insolvency” (-2), “getting electricity connection” (-4), and “starting a business” (-8).

The new methodology is characterised by ranking on ease of doing business with regard to countries that are rated as the best practice in specific areas (distance to frontier score). Previous rankings were made with respect to average score of different countries within specific areas. Furthermore, this year’s and 2016 Doing Business reports introduce changes in 8 out of 10 indicators - “issuing construction permits”, “getting electricity connection”, “property registration”, “getting credit”, “investor protection”, “enforcing contracts” and “resolving insolvency” - through introducing qualitative aspects of regulations.

In the region, only Macedonia (30) ranks higher than Montenegro, while Slovenia (51), Croatia (65), Albania (68), Kosovo (75), Serbia (91), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (107) rank lower, the report concludes.

Full 2015 Doing Business report is available at: http://www.doingbusiness.org/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2015.