In Bad for Business, Hans Labohm cites the opening lines of “Doing Business in 2006 — Creating Jobs”, a report cosponsored by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group:
If you were opening a new business in Lao PDR, the start-up procedures would take 198 days. If you were opening one in Syria, you would have to put up $61,000 in minimum capital — 51 times the average annual income. If you were building a warehouse in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fees for utility hook-up and compliance with building regulations would amount to 87 times average income. And if you ran a business in Guatemala, it would take you 1,459 days to resolve a simple dispute in the courts. If you were paying all business taxes in Sierra Leone, they would take 164 percent of your company’s gross profit.