Is it Easy to Do Business in MBA Students’ Favorite Study Locations?

The World Bank Group has released its latest assessment of the ease with which one can conduct business in 189 economies around the world.

Doing Business 2016: Measuring Regulatory Quality and Efficiency measures a country’s performance across 11 facets of business activity, from starting a company to cross-border trading. From this, the report produces an overall ranking based on 10 indicators (the one exclusion is labor market regulation) as well as rankings across each individual indicator.

For any prospective MBA students looking not only at where they would most like to study, but also at economies about which they might like to learn more when starting a course of MBA study, the report’s findings should make for interesting reading. You might even find yourself a potential destination for your post-MBA career. 

Singapore tops World Bank ranking

Singapore leads the World Bank report’s overall top 10 and places 1st in three individual categories, including one that looks at a country’s ability to enforce contracts through an efficient judiciary system. New Zealand is 2nd and comes out on top in both the ‘starting a business’ and ‘getting credit’ segments. In 3rd place, meanwhile, is Denmark, which shares 1st place for ‘trading across borders’ with a number of other European nations.

These three nations all rank among MBA applicants’ 15 favourite study destinations this year, yet eight countries are more often considered by prospective MBA students than Singapore, the World Bank report’s leader. So, how did the big MBA study destinations get on?

What of the most popular destinations for MBA students?

When looking to the three locations that are most popular with prospective MBA students, we see that the US ranks 7th overall, one place behind the UK in 6th, with Canada a little way outside of the top 10 in 14th.

These are all pretty good rankings, with the US rated among the top five in the world for ‘getting credit’ and ‘resolving insolvency’, the UK placing 4th for ‘protecting minority investors’, and Canada 3rd for ‘starting a business’. However, each also has its relative weak spot – the US is outside the top 50 in the World Bank report’s assessment of how easy it is to pay taxes, the UK is 45th when it comes to ‘registering property’ and Canada is a lowly 105th for ‘getting electricity’.     

Popular European study destinations for MBA students that don’t rank quite so highly overall in the Doing Business report include Italy and Spain, rated 45th and 33rd, respectively. In Asia-Pacific, India crawls in at 130th, with China in 84th; Hong Kong, however, ranks as high as 5th overall.

Measuring progress is chief aim of World Bank report

As intriguing as these rankings are, the true purpose behind the World Bank report is to keep track of economic reforms taking place around the world and to identify what measures are working and why. After all, it isn’t always fair to hold high and low-income countries to the same standards and the ranking does allow for placements to be separated across four income categories (top of those deemed ‘low income’, for instance, is Rwanda, ahead of Nepal).

This year, the report notes that reforms aimed at facilitating the process of starting a new business were the most common type of reform worldwide, as was also the case last year. However, between 2014 and 2015, it finds that reforms have made life easier for entrepreneurs in 122 economies – that’s 65% of the economies assessed.   

The report also has praise for the progress made by economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, in which 30% of all the past year’s regulatory reform is to be found. Indeed, a number of individual economies from the region make the World Bank’s top 10 for improvements between June 2014 and June 2015, including Senegal, Benin and Kenya. Other economies that feature in this top 10 include Costa Rica, Cyprus and Kazakhstan – a country in which MBA job opportunities are developing rapidly, according to QS’s latest MBA Jobs & Salary Trends Report.