💼 Business-Friendliness

Allow us to paraphrase an old cliché and just say: small businesses are the backbone of the (Latin) American economy.

Given this, today let’s look at the ease – or difficulty – with which someone can start a business in different regional countries. We’ll take a small sample size of just six diverse countries across Central and South America: Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru and compare them to the rest of the world.

Pulling from the World Bank’s Business Ready dataset, we mapped out five key metrics (out of the WB’s overall ten) to evaluate these countries’ regulatory frameworks and their efficiency. When tallying up final scores across these metrics, it’s clear that Colombia is a definite regional leader, bolstered by the relative ease of registering and starting up a new company in the country.

Following Colombia we have Mexico and Costa Rica, the latter of which excels in the purchasing and leasing options available to entrepreneurs on top of property ownership regulation quality.

Mexico, meanwhile, is particularly strong in both the provision of utilities and the access entrepreneurs have to commercial lending, e-payments, and credit info.

While these countries definitely outperform their peers in Asunción, Lima, or San Salvador, it’s clear that as countries develop, policymakers will likely prioritize business-friendly regulatory frameworks to stimulate entrepreneurship and wealth creation.