The World Economic Forum has published a report which sheds light on some of the barriers companies face in conducting business in Africa and other parts of the world.
The report dubbed, Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017 seeks to capture the concerns of business leaders across the globe while assessing the competitiveness landscape of 138 economies.
Every year the WEF conducts the executive opinion survey, asking business leaders around the world to rate the factors they consider most problematic for doing business in their country.
Doing Business in Kenya….
Doing business in Kenya is not a walk in the park! This is because there are lots of problematic factors business leaders will need to overcome in order to successfully do business in the country.
Respondents to the Executive Opinion Survey were asked to select the five most problematic factors for doing business in Kenya and rank them between 1 (most problematic) and 5 (less problematic) .
In 2016, corruption was considered the most problematic factor for doing business in Kenya, followed by tax rates that depressed business activity further. Access to financing emerged as the third-ranked concern followed by inefficient government bureaucracy. The score (in the image below) corresponds to the responses weighted according to their rankings for Kenya.
The most striking change is the surge of access to finance as one of the most serious problems for business in many countries, a consequence of the global financial crisis in 2008.
Because of deleveraging and stricter regulations in the banking sector, uncertain economic prospects, and despite extremely low interest rates, obtaining finance is still very difficult, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises.
