Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.
Singapore continues to be the economy with the most business-friendly regulation. And while there was some reordering of economies within the top 20 in the ease of doing business ranking, the list remains very similar to last year’s: 18 economies stayed on the list, while 2 entered this year (Lithuania and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) whereas 2 were _______________ out (Georgia and Switzerland). Economies in the top 20 continued to improve their business regulatory environment in the past year. For example, Hong Kong SAR, China, made four regulatory reforms in the areas measured by Doing Business.
The 20 economies at the top of the ease of doing business ranking perform well not only on the Doing Business indicators but also in international data sets capturing other dimensions of competitiveness.
The economies performing best in the Doing Business rankings therefore are not those with no regulation but those whose governments have managed to create rules that facilitate interactions in the marketplace without needlessly hindering the development of the private sector. Moreover, even outside the top 20 economies there is a strong association between performance in the ease of doing business ranking and performance on measures of competitiveness and of quality of government and governance. Economies that rank well on the ease of doing business also score well on such measures as the Global Competitiveness Index and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
The distance to frontier scores underlying the ease of doing business rankings reveal some regional patterns. OECD high-income economies have the highest distance to frontier scores on average, indicating that this regional group has the most business-friendly regulation overall. But good practices in business regulation can be found in almost all regions. In six of the seven regions the highest distance to frontier score is above 70. The difference between the good and worse scores in a region can be substantial, however, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa and East Asia and the Pacific.
Analysis shows that efficiency and quality go hand in hand: economies that have efficient regulatory processes as measured by Doing Business also tend to have good regulatory quality.