Ras Al Khaimah makes 'noteworthy strides', says World Bank report

The Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah has made "noteworthy strides" in ease of doing business, a World Bank report has noted.

According to the 'Doing Business 2019 in Ras Al Khaimah' report, the emirate has shown "significant improvement" as a result of reforms introduced by federal authorities in four areas: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, registering property and enforcing contracts.

This report is the third Subnational 'Doing Business' benchmarking in the emirate. It investigates regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. The report provides quantitative indicators in Ras Al Khaimah business environment, and notes how they compare with measures from 190 economies worldwide.

"Ras Al Khaimah's estimated Ease of Doing Business, EODB, score in 2019 is 77.52," the report stated, adding that it would place the emirate among the top 30 economies on the ease of doing business, ahead of France, which scored an EODB of 77.29. Ras Al Khaimah also scored "higher than that of all Gulf Cooperation Council, GCC, countries" as a result of a number of reforms implemented since 2016, the last time the Subnational benchmark was undertaken in the emirate, the report added.

Another improvement in rankings for the emirate includes the efficiency in the process to resolve a commercial dispute in Ras Al Khaimah's courts. According to the date collected by the World Bank's Subnational Doing Business report, "contract enforcement takes 160 days and costs 24.9 percent of the value claim," compared to Singapore, considered by the report as the best regulatory performer globally, which scored 164 days in the time index of the enforcing contracts indicator.

"Globally," the report added, "Ras Al Khaimah stands at 29 in the ranking of 190 economies" with regards to contracts enforcement.

These results are indicative of the reforms being implemented in all four benchmarks, the report added.

"Since 2016, Ras Al Khaimah's EODB score jumped from 84.51 to 86.12 on starting a business; from 62.18 to 71.28 on dealing with construction permits; and from 67.87 to 69.25 on enforcing contracts," the report findings indicated.

The report noted that despite reforms being implemented, the registering property benchmark "dropped from 85.00 to 82.92 mainly because of the increase in cost to register property."

The goal of Doing Business in Ras Al Khaimah is to provide objective data for use by governments in designing sound business regulatory policies and to encourage research on the important dimensions of the regulatory environment for firms.