UAE aims to become most business friendly country by 2021

The UAE aims to become the most business friendly country in the world over the next couple of years and the target is quite achievable, senior official of UAE and World Bank Group said on Sunday, December 8.

Currently ranked 16^th in the World Bank's Doing Business study, Abdulla Nasser Lootah, Director-General of Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority (FCSA), said the aim is to achieve top ranking globally in the World Bank report by 2021.

Despite a drop of five positions in the latest report, the UAE maintains first position in ranking in the region.

Cemile Hacibeyoglu, senior private sector specialist at World Bank Group, said the UAE has introduced nearly three dozen reforms in the last one decade and achieving the top position in the report is feasible.

"In the last 10 years, the UAE took 36 reforms in all 10 areas measured in the report. The UAE reached the position of 16 and it has stated the goal to reach number one and that is feasible," Hacibeyoglu said on the sidelines of a press conference hosted to announce the third edition of World Bank's Doing Business Technical Deep Dive conference which will run from December 10 to 13 in Dubai.

Around 350 reformers across 30 countries will gather to discuss and brainstorm on technical aspects as well as share knowledge about reforms during the four-day programme.

"In the coming days, many aspiring reformers from across the globe will come to learn from the UAE's best practices and share their efforts aimed at narrowing the gap with top reforming economies in the world," she said.

The 2020 Doing Business report, which was launched in October 2019, showed that reform expertise is growing in the Middle-East and Africa regions. Economies in the Middle East and North Africa implemented a record 57 business-friendly reforms and hosted four of the countries that improved the most world-wide in the ease of doing business - Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

Abdullah Nasser Lootah said achieving top position was set as a part of vision 2021.

"If you have the energy and will, you can achieve target. Hopefully, we can achieve it," he said, adding that "countries cannot be complacent once they achieve top position. Keeping number one position is even more difficult than getting to number one. You have to keep improving against all the others. So it is quite an undertaking and is not dependent on one entity or individual but it is a collaborative approach and efforts of all," he said.