Dubai hosts Doing Business Technical Deep Dive

Dubai: The third high-profile Doing Business Technical Deep Dive kicked off in Dubai on Tuesday, hosted by the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority (FCA) in coordination with the Ministry of Finance.

The event organised by the World Bank Group, with the support of the UAE’s FCA

is scheduled to take place over the course of four days, under the theme ‘Global Aspiration Towards Business Growth and Economic Prosperity”.

“The UAE has established partnerships with the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation that have led to a host of successes and accomplishments across various sectors. Our cooperation to support competitiveness is one of our most successful; the UAE believes in the Doing Business Report, welcomes its findings with an open mind, and implements its recommendations to advance through the ranks and assume the top spots among the countries of the world on the index,” said Hessa bint Essa Buhumaid, Minister of Community Development, in her opening remarks.

The event brings together more than 350 experts from 45 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Asia. The agenda includes several panel discussions, workshops, lectures, and field trips to explore best practices in government entities around the UAE that have earned high global rankings on the Doing Business Report.

“We take international reports very seriously here in the UAE; we use them to launch projects and update legislations and procedures to be in line with reality and pave the way for a better future. We all have a common goal: to develop a single, unified approach for analysing and understanding the Doing Business Report and its projections for the upcoming years. We are here to exchange expertise and connect with experts and specialists,” said Abdulla Nasser Lootah, Director General of the FCSA,

The UAE’s journey with competitiveness has had its fair share of challenges and successes that have propelled the UAE to the top ranks on numerous international competitiveness indexes.

In the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business 2020, published in October this year, the UAE was ranked at 16th position in the global ranking of 190 countries.

In 2019, the UAE was ranked 11th position in the World Bank ranking. Despite a small dip in the overall ranking this year, the UAE continues to keep its score high in key areas of the global ranking.

The World Bank report this year made a special mention of reforms undertook by the UAE such as making starting of a business less expensive by reducing the fees for business incorporation, easier construction permits by using a risk-based approach to reduce the number of inspections, improving minority investor protection, ease of paying taxes and making trading across borders easier by reducing the time to export by fully digitising certificates of origin and the cost to import by issuing certificates of conformity that cover multiple shipments.