New Zealand is the easiest country of 190 in which to do business, according to the World Bank's 15th Doing Business report.
The Bank uses 11 indicator sets to measure aspects of business regulation. These cover the processes for starting a business, obtaining a building permit, getting an electricity connection, transferring property, paying taxes, taking a commercial dispute to court, and resolving an insolvency case as well as credit and equity market regulations and the logistics of importing and exporting goods.
The system used for ranking calculates the "distance to frontier score". This captures the gap between an economy's current performance and the best practice across the entire sample of 41 indicators across 10 Doing Business indicator sets.
The frontier is set at 100 percentage points and the percentage point distance to frontier scores of an economy on different indicators are averaged to obtain an overall distance to frontier score.
Doing Business 2018 Ease of doing business ranking - top 10 and bottom 5
| Rank | Economy | DTF Score |
| 1 | New Zealand | 86.55 |
| 2 | Singapore | 84.57 |
| 3 | Denmark | 84.06 |
| 4 | South Korea | 83.92 |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 83.44 |
| 6 | United States | 82.54 |
| 7 | United Kingdom | 82.22 |
| 8 | Norway | 82.16 |
| 9 | Georgia | 82.04 |
| 10 | Sweden | 81.27 |
| 186 | Yemen | 33.00 |
| 187 | South Sudan | 32.86 |
| 188 | Venezuela | 30.87 |
| 189 | Eritrea | 22.87 |
| 190 | Somalia | 19.98 |
New Zealand reforms in 2016/17
The report looks at the reforms and changes made over the past year in each country which have made it easier or harder to do business. It says New Zealand made paying taxes easier by improving the online portal for filing and paying general sales tax.
On the negative side, it says New Zealand temporarily made enforcing contracts more difficult by suspending the filing of new commercial cases before the Commercial List of the HIgh Court of New Zealand during the establishment of a new Commercial Panel.