Bosnia and Herzegovina fell three places in the Doing Business report on the ease of doing business in the world. According to the World Bank’s 2019 report, Bosnia was placed 89th, far behind the rest of the Western Balkan countries.

This year’s worse ranking does not necessarily mean that Bosnia’s business climate has gone worse, but stresses the fact that other countries have improved their own business climate through reforms, thus becoming more competitive. Bosnia, however, recorded no improvements in any of the areas observed by the report.

According to the overall ease of doing business, the best ranking regional country is the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia which was places 10th, followed by Kosovo (44), Serbia (48), Montenegro (50) and Albania (63).

The European and central Asian economies sped up the reform dynamics aimed at improving the ease of doing business for small and medium enterprises with a total of 54 business reforms implemented over the course of 2018. the increase is significant, considering that 43 reforms were implemented in 2017. Almost all the countries of the total of 23 countries of the region have implemented reforms helping job growth and incentivising private entrepreneurship.

Two of the top 10 ranking economies in this year’s report belong to this region with Georgia reaching sixth position and the FYR of Macedonia reaching 10th place. Two countries marked as making the biggest reform progress in this year’s report are also part of this region, and those are Azerbaijan and Turkey.