South Africa improved its global ease-of-doing-business ranking by one position, climbing from 36 to 35 in the latest International Finance Corporation-World Bank ‘Doing Business’ report. For the fourth consecutive year, Mauritius was found to be the easiest place in sub-Saharan Africa to do business, with a global ranking of 23.

The review entitled ‘Doing Business 2012: Doing Business in a More Transparent World’, assessed regulations affecting firms in 183 economies, covering such issues as starting a business, resolving insolvency, trading across borders and accessing electricity.

Singapore led the rankings, followed by Hong Kong, New Zealand, the US and Denmark, while Korea was a new top-ten entrant.

The 12 economies that improved the most during the year included Morocco, Moldova, Macedonia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Latvia, Cape Verde, Sierra Leone, Burundi, the Solomon Islands, Korea, Armenia and Colombia.

South Africa’s improvement was attributed partly to its implementation of new company legislation, which made starting a business easier by simplifying the incorporation documents and eliminating the requirement to reserve a company name.

In addition, South Africa made resolving insolvency easier by introducing a new reorganisation process to facilitate the rehabilitation of financially distressed companies. The report also notes that the country made transferring property less costly and more efficient by reducing the transfer duty and introducing electronic filing.

The pace of regulatory improvements had also picked up markedly across sub-Saharan Africa, with a record 36 of the 46 governments in the region having implemented reforms in at least one of the ten areas measured by the report between June 2010 and May 2011.

The report also shows that governments in 125 economies implemented a total of 245 business regulatory reforms, which represented a 13% rise on the number of reforms made in the previous review.