Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 1 December 2016
292. Deputy Niall Collins asked the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the way in which she expects Ireland to attain a top-five ranking for global competitiveness, considering Irish rankings on the World Bank's ease of doing business index have continued to reduce over recent years. [38269/16]
View answerDoing Business looks at domestic, primarily small and medium size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle. Using quantitative indicators on a range of business regulations that can be compared across 190 economies and over time, Doing Business goes beyond identifying that a problem exists and points to specific regulations or regulatory procedures that may lend themselves to reform.
In the 2017 report, Ireland’s was ranked 18th – down 3 places, compared with our revised 2016 ranking. While this is disappointing, Ireland is ranked 8th amongst EU member states and 5th in the euro area. Doing Business also highlights many of Ireland’s strengths – for example, we are ranked 5th for “paying taxes” and 10th for “starting a business”.
Furthermore, in terms of the Distance to Frontier benchmark - which measures Ireland’s score against the benchmark set by the best performing economy across ten different category headings – Ireland’s performance has actually improved slightly since 2016. Of course, other countries are also striving to improve their business environments, hence the improvement in our score but drop in our ranking.
This serves to remind us that competitiveness is a relative measure. The process of reform and improvement must be continuous.
I would also note that Ireland is a strong performer in other international competitiveness rankings – this year, for instance, we are ranked 7th out of 61 countries in the IMD’s World Competitiveness Yearbook - an improvement from 16th in last year’s report.
In July of this year, the National Competitiveness Council published its annual Competitiveness Scorecard benchmarking report which provides an in-depth assessment of all aspects of Ireland’s international competitiveness performance. The Council found that while Ireland’s competitiveness has improved in recent years – and has been central to recent strong economic growth, a number of threats persist, not least of which is Brexit.
The analysis contained in the Scorecard report is informing the development of the Council’s annual policy report Ireland’s Competitiveness Challenge 2016 which I will shortly be bringing to Government for consideration and which will contain a range of actions to enhance competitiveness.
My officials will continue to monitor publications such as the World Bank Doing Business report. Further actions and reforms - driven by the 2017 Action Plan for Jobs which is currently being prepared - will enable us to further narrow the gap with the world’s most competitive countries and improve the ease of doing business, ultimately helping us to achieve our objective of sustainable full employment.
