The World Economic Forum (WEF) last week published its 2009 annual report on enabling trade around the world.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) last week published its 2009 annual report on enabling trade around the world.
Published for the second time and covering 121 economies worldwide, the report presents a resource for dialogue and provides a yardstick of the extent to which economies have in place the necessary attributes for enabling trade and where improvements are most needed.
The index has been revised since it was first published in 2008. The main changes concern the explicit inclusion of the export dimension in the index and the addition of an assessment of overall governance conditions to the business environment sub-index.
Countries with the highest Enabling Trade Index (ETI) are Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden, followed by Canada, Norway, Finland, Austria and the Netherlands.
The least trade-friendly countries, according to the report are: Chad, Ivory Coast, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
The United States is in 16th place whilst the United Kingdom is ranked 20th.
Israel, ranked 29, features fairly well in the overall index which noted the following weaknesses: physical security (83rd place) transport infrastructure (54th places) and quality of transport services (43rd place).
