Macedonia remains among top performers globally on the ease of doing business, improving its ranking from the 31st place last year to the 30th place in this year’s report, the latest Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency shows. For example, 10 years ago, starting a new business took a Macedonian entrepreneur 48 days. Today, the process can be completed in 2 days.

The country has also moved closer to the best global practice, a more important measure of progress than the ranking as it does not depend on the relative performance of other countries, the report reads.

The new “distance to frontier” measure shows how well each economy is doing in relation to the global best practice, highest performance observed on each of the indicators across all economies measured in Doing Business. An economy’s distance to frontier is reflected on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the lowest performance and 100 represent the frontier.

According to the Doing Business Report 2015, Macedonia’s score is 74.1 percent, which is a 1.4 percentage points’ improvement from 2014.

Macedonia made starting a business easier by making online registration free of charge. Minority investor protections were strengthened by requiring prior review of related-party transactions by an external auditor. In addition, resolving insolvency is now easier thanks to the establishment of a framework for electronic auctions of debtors’ assets, streamlining and tightening the time frames for insolvency proceedings and the appeals process, and a framework for out-of-court restructurings, reads the report.

The annual World Bank Group flagship Doing Business report analyzes regulations that apply to an economy’s businesses during their life cycle, including start-up and operations, trading across borders, paying taxes, and resolving insolvency. The aggregate ease of doing business rankings are based on the distance to frontier scores for 10 topics and cover 189 economies.