Doing business in Pakistan

Islamabad is the best city in the country to start a business, Sialkot and Faisalabad have the best property registration system and Sukkur is the best place to get commercial contracts enforced. These were just a few of the many illuminating insights offered by the World Bank’s “Doing Business in Pakistan 2010” report, the first such report devoted entirely to an inter-city analysis of business regulations across Pakistan. One of the most interesting, and important, highlights of the report was that while property registration is not necessarily a complicated process, it takes an extraordinarily long time to complete. Yet the process is not quite so cumbersome nationwide. Lahore, Sialkot and Faisalabad, for instance, have made great strides in computerising the property registration process, making it simpler and easier.

And that was the central point of the report: cities can adopt each other’s best practices in their regulation of businesses to promote a conducive environment for entrepreneurship. Pakistan currently ranks 85 out of 183 nations worldwide in terms of its ease of doing business, according to the report. Yet if the entire country were simply to adopt as standard the practices of the best city in each category, it’s ranking as a whole would reportedly jump 16 places. The World Bank has done a good job of highlighting key factors to focus on. It’s now the government’s turn to heed their recommendations. That, after all, is its very purpose of existence. In fairness, the government has been doing its bit. In 2006, the country was ranked among the top 10 reformers in terms of making regulations simpler and better. Yet there seems to have been a lack of attention to strengthening the institutional capacity of the government since then. We hope this report revives the government’s interest in making the lives of job-creating entrepreneurs a little easier.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 1^st, 2010.