Hardest country in which to do business

According to the World Bank's 2018 Doing Business report, the country with the most obstacles to setting up and operating a business is Somalia, which scored 45.77 in the organization's "Distance-to-Frontier" rankings.

The World Bank's Doing Business Project has been publishing its Distance-to-Frontier rankings on an annual basis since 2003. Country rankings are compiled from statistics covering eleven key areas: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency, and labor market regulation.

The statistics collected for the "starting a business" section, for example, include the number of procedures (individual bits of paperwork) required to get things moving, the time in days that the process usually takes, the cost of getting applications approved, and the minimum capital requirements.

In top-ranked New Zealand someone who wants to start a business needs to go through one application procedure, pays less than 0.3% of the country's average income in fees, and the whole process takes less than a day. To do the same thing in bottom-ranked Somalia, a prospective business-owner would have to make nine separate applications, pay double the average annual income in fees, and wait for more than two months.