World Bank consultants have committed to developing reform recommendations that will help to propel Jamaica to the top 10 of the Doing Business Report (DBR) ranking by 2020.

The reform memo, which will be accompanied by three action plans, is currently in development after a two-week mission in April, where the World Bank met with local public and private sector partners that impact the country’s business environment.

Last year Jamaica’s National Competitiveness Council (NCC) announced it was targeting being ranked amongst the top 10 countries globally after ranking 67 of 190 countries in 2017, three places better than the country’s ranking in 2016.

Jamaica Promotions Corporation (Jampro), which manages NCC, in a release yesterday said at least one recommendation has already been actioned by the National Land Agency, working with the Companies Office of Jamaica, to enable the easier registration of a transfer of a property. World Bank’s reform memorandum and action plans for the dealing with construction permits, paying taxes and enforcing contracts indicators will be submitted to the NCC Secretariat by June.

The annual DBR is produced by the World Bank and is the leading reference on global ease of doing business and reforms implemented to improve a country’s business environment.

The 2017 DBR labelled trade across borders, registering property, enforcing contracts, paying taxes, and getting electricity as the top five issues suppressing the Jamaica’s global ranking. The most troubled category — trading across borders — ranked 131 of 190 countries from the average time of 105 hours it took to export goods, 152 hours to import, and import cost of US$996.

With competition for investments in the global economy increasing, Jampro President Diane Edwards warned that Jamaica must aggressively seek to improve its performance on notable global rankings like the Doing Business and World Competitiveness Reports to further attract investors and provide an enabling business environment locally.

“Jamaica has already made substantial improvements on the Doing Business Ranking. We are now fifth in the world with regards to the ‘Starting a Business’ indicator due to deliberate actions taken by the Companies Office of Jamaica, and we also improved in the ‘Getting Electricity’ and ‘Trading Across Borders’ indicators in the last DBR,” she said.

“While this performance is to be congratulated, we need to accelerate the rate of reforms passed in Jamaica to ensure that we remain competitive on an international level. In last year’s ranking Jamaica ranked second after Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, while the country maintained its spot at sixth in the Latin American and Caribbean region. We want to move towards leading the entire region, and I believe that by monitoring and implementing the reforms on the current Business Environment Reform Agenda and executing these proposed reforms and action plans from the World Bank, we will be much closer to the top 10 goal that we aim to reach by 2020,” Edwards continued.

The initiatives monitored and facilitated on the NCC Business Environment Reform Agenda are specifically focused on enhancing Jamaica’s performance in key international indices such as the DBR, the Global Competitiveness Index and the Logistics Performance Index.