GAM red tape ‘behind Jordan’s low ranking on Doing Business’

AMMAN — The Jordan Strategy Forum (JSF) on Sunday proposed a set of recommendations to improve Jordan’s ranking in the Doing Business Report 2017.

The Kingdom is currently ranked 118 out of 190 countries on the index.

The report by the forum, called the”Way Forward”, showed that the lengthy procedures at the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) are a main reason behind dropping Jordan’s ranking and score in a number of indices.

Obtaining a vocational licence from GAM consumes 75 per cent (8 days) of the time required to start a business according to the report, while it takes 8.5 days to complete all the procedures in the UAE, for example, it indicated.

Furthermore, in the “dealing with construction permits” indicator, GAM procedures take 32 days from a total of 63 days. GAM also takes a further 7 days in the “getting electricity” indicator, and a further 4 days in the “registering property” indicator. 

The study showed that if GAM was more efficient, and its procedures less numerous, Jordan’s performance would be greatly improved, the forum said in its report, which was e-mailed to The Jordan Times.

The study found that if the time it takes to obtain a vocational licence from GAM is reduced to four days, Jordan’s rank in the “Starting a Business” indicator would have been 94 rather than 106 in the Doing Business report.

“Jordanians spend approximately 145 hours each year, spread over 25 payments, paying taxes. This entails the average time it takes to make each payment is 5.8 hours,” it indicated.

If the average time to make each payment was three hours, Jordan’s ranking would be 72 rather than 79 out of 190. Furthermore, if the number of required payments was decreased to 20 rather than 25, Jordan’s ranking would be 68, the report said.

‘Jordan has glut of procedures‘ 

Reducing the number of procedures, and thereby decreasing the associated time, would greatly increase Jordan’s rank and score, as well as improve the reality of doing business in the Kingdom, the authors said.

If the recommendations proposed by JSF were implemented, Jordan would be ranked 102 with a distance to frontier of 60.08 per cent, a 16-place difference, the forum concluded.