The Doing Business project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level.
The Doing Business project, launched in 2002, looks at domestic small and medium-size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle.
Doing Business captures several important dimensions of the regulatory environment as it applies to local rms. It provides quantitative indicators on regulation for starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency. Doing Business also measures features of labor market regulation. Although Doing Business does not present rankings of economies on the labor market regulation indicators or include the topic in the aggregate distance to frontier score or ranking on the ease of doing business, it does present the data for these indicators.
By gathering and analyzing comprehensive quantitative data to compare business regulation environments across economies and over time, Doing Business encourages economies to compete towards more efficient regulation; offers measurable benchmarks for reform; and serves as a resource for academics, journalists, private sector researchers and others interested in the business climate of each economy.
Business Reforms in Kenya
In the year ending June 1, 2017, 119 economies implemented 264 total reforms across the different areas measured by Doing Business. Doing Business has recorded more than 2,900 regulatory reforms making it easier to do business since 2004. Reforms inspired by Doing Business have been implemented by economies in all regions. The following are the reforms for Kenya implemented between 2017 and 2018.
Starting a Business: Kenya made starting a business easier by merging procedures required to start-up and formally operate a business.
Dealing with Construction Permits: Kenya made dealing with construction permits less expensive by eliminating fees for clearances from the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and the National Construction Authority.
Getting Electricity: Kenya improved the reliability of electricity by investing in its distribution lines and transformers and by setting up a specialized squad to restore power when outages occur.
Getting Credit: Kenya improved access to credit information by starting to distribute data from two utility companies.
Paying Taxes: Kenya made paying taxes easier by implementing an online platform, iTax, for ling and paying corporate income tax and the standards levy.
Trading across Borders: Kenya reduced the time for import documentary compliance by utilizing its single window system, which allows for electronic submission of customs entries.