“The World Bank’s Internaltional Finance Corportion (IFC) did a study in 2004 entitled Doing Business in 2004, covering 130 countries. In the United Arab Emeriates, it can take 27 procedures and 550 days to resolve a payment dispute. It takes 2 days to start a business in Austrailia, but 203 days in Haiti and 215 days in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "There are no monetary costs to start a new business in Denmark, but it costs more than five times income per capita in Cambodia and over thirteen times in Sierra Leone. Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and more than three dozen other economies require no minimum capital from start-ups. In contrast, in Syria the capital requirement is equivalent to fifty-six times income per capita. . . Businesses in the Czech Republic and Denmark can hire workers on part-time or fixed-term contracts only for any job, without specifying maximum duration of the contract. In contrast, employment laws in El Salvador allow fixed-term contracts for only specified jobs, and set their duration to be at most one year . . . A simple commercial contract is enforced in seven days in Tunisia and thirty-nine days in the Netherlands, but takes almost 1,500 days in Guatemala. The cost of enforcement is less than 1 percent of the disputed amount in Austria, Canada and the United Kingdom, but more than 100 percent in Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia . . and the Philippines. Credit Bureaus contain credit histories on almost every adult in New Zealand, Norway and the United States. But the credit registries in Cameroon, Ghana, Pakistan, Nigeria and Serbia and Montenegro have credit histories for less than 1 percent of adults. In the United Kingdom, laws on collateral and bankruptcy give creditors strong powers to recover their money if a debtor defaults. In Columbia, the Republic of Congo, Mexico, Oman and Tunisia, a creditor has no such rights. It takes less than six months to go through bankruptcy proceedings in Ireland and Japan, but more than ten years in Brazil and India. It costs less than 1 percent of the value of the estate to resolve insolvency in Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Singapore - and nearly half the estate value in Chad, Panama, Macedonia, Venezuela, Serbia and Montenegro, and Sierra Leone."”
