Dhaka is the most businessfriendly city in Bangladesh, according to a study by the World Bank (WB) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Bogra imposes the most complex and costly administrative barriers, while Chittagong and Khulna rank in the middle, said the study that covered only four cities of the country. The study report, titled Doing Business in South Asia 2007 that included subnational data from Bangladesh for the first time, was released in Washington DC on February 13.

The report compares business regulations in South Asia with 175 economies around the world. The top ranked countries in the region are the Maldives (53) and Pakistan (74), followed by Bangladesh (88), Sri Lanka (89), Nepal (100), India (134), Bhutan (138) and Afghanistan (162).

This year,Bangladesh implemented reforms to simplify property registration and improved the environment for businesses by introducing the land registration act (in force since July 1, 2005) to reduce fraud in land tenure, said the report. Despite improvements in the area of property registration one of the 10 Doing Business indicators Bangladesh can still do much better, it added.

WB Country Director Zhu Xian said Bangladesh could jump in the international rankings if it simply adopts the best practices in business regulation that already exist within the country from 88th to 62nd on the global Doing Business rankings. The report said, local regulations and different implementation of nationallevel regulations cause large differences in the case of doing business among Bangladeshi cities. For example, in Dhaka it takes 13 procedures and 185 days to obtain a license, compared to 15 procedures and 150 days in Chittagong, and 14 procedures and 146 days in Bogra.