WASHINGTON, D.C. - On September 8th, 2009 the World Bank Group released Doing Business 2010: Reforming through Difficult Times. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is honored to have partnered with eight of the top-ten countries highlighted for reforms to make it easier for entrepreneurs to start and expand their businesses. USAID programs provided technical support to Rwanda, Kyrgyz Republic, Macedonia, Moldova, Colombia, Tajikistan, Egypt, and Liberia.

USAID partnered with the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan to implement a dozen reforms over the past year to improve the business environment. This assistance to the Kyrgyz Republic improved its ranking from 90th in 2007 to 41st. Activities included the government's 100 Days of Reform program that led to improvements in seven of the ten areas in the report. USAID assisted Tajikistan with reforms to streamline business registration, construction permits, and property registration as well as the introduction of a credit bureau, and improved investor protections and insolvency procedures.

USAID partnered with Colombia to reduce the time to start a business, increase consumer access to their credit histories, reduce the time required to import/export goods, and improvee investor protections. Colombia improved its rank from 79th in 2007 to 37th and is now the top-performing country in Latin America. Since 2006, the time to register a business and export goods has been cut in half, and the time to obtain a construction license and register property reduced by two-thirds.

USAID partnered with Egypt on reforms that reduced the capital required for new business registrations, made it faster to obtain required construction permits, and created specialized commercial courts to reduce the time required to resolve disputes. These reforms build on a history of USAID assistance in Egypt that since 2006 have reduced the time to register a business from 34 days to 7, reduced the time to register property by more than a hundred days, and cut in half the time to export/import goods.

USAID partnered with Macedonia on streamlining the operations of a one-stop shop for business registration, introduction of time limits for property registration as well as a number of other reforms highlighted in the report. Since 2007, the business registration process has been cut from 18 days to 4, property registration from 98 days to 58, and the time to export from 32 days to 12.

USAID partnered with Moldova to simplify procedures for business registration. Time to register a business fell from 30 days to 10 days from 2007 to 2010.

USAID partnered with Liberia in improving the customs clearance processes at the port in Monrovia through the establishment of a one-stop shop that cut several days from the time to import/export goods.

In Rwanda, USAID projects reduced the time to export goods and improved access to credit. Reforms that will be reflected in the 2011 report include the establishment of a private credit bureau.

USAID is proud to have partnered with the Doing Business project since the initial publication of the report in 2004. USAID is currently supporting economic reformers in more than 50 developing country governments. USAID awards hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and grants annually with the objective of improving the business environment in developing countries.

For more information about the Doing Business report series, please visit: www.doingbusiness.org