Malaysia continues efforts to improve business climate for entrepreneurs
KUALA LUMPUR: The new World Bank Group’s Doing Business Report has revealed that Malaysia continued its efforts to improve the business climate for local entrepreneurs.
The report, ‘ Doing Business 2017: Equal Opportunity for All’, which was launched yesterday, also found that Malaysia was one of 17 economies that implemented reforms in East Asia and the Pacific region in the past year.
Country Manager of World Bank Group’s Global Knowledge and Research Hub in Malaysia, Faris H.
Hadad-Zervos, said Malaysia has implemented two business reforms in the past year, including the strengthening of credit reporting by providing consumer credit scores.
“With this change, Malaysia has attained a perfect score in the depth of credit information index of the Doing Business Indicator of Getting Credit,” he told reporters after the launch of the report here yesterday.
According to the report, Malaysia also made it easier to pay taxes by introducing an online system for filing and paying goods and services tax, reducing the number of payments to comply with the taxes to nine for medium- sized company from 13 in the previous year.
Faris said Malaysia continued to be among the top 15 performers g loba l ly in dea l i ng with construction permits, which required only 79 days to obtain construction permit versus the global average of 156 days.
“Malaysia also retains its spot this year as the third best economy in the world in terms of protecting minority investors,” he said.
The tax paying taxes indicator for the report this year has been expanded to include measures of post- filing processes relating to tax audits and tax refunds.
Faris said Malaysia performed well on this measure, taking about five hours to comply with a corporate income tax audit as compared to the regional average of 18 hours. — Bernama