Thailand 18th best world investment destination
BANGKOK:
Thailand saw its rank move up one notch–from 19th place to 18th place among 175 countries surveyed by
the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a lead economist of the World Bank
said Wednesday. Singapore dethroned New Zealand, last year’s chart topper, as the world’s most favourable
investment destination. The United States is ranked 3rd followed by Canada and Hong Kong respectively.
Thailand performed well to upgrade its ranking in some areas of the survey, such as assets registration,
but there is still much left to be desired in terms of business regulations which hinder foreign investment,
the lack of skilled workers and public utilities as well as transparency and good governance to protect
investors, according to Kazi M. Martin, the World Bank’s Bangkok-based lead economist for Southeast Asia.
The rankings were announced in a report entitled “Doing Business 2007: How to Reform” released by the
International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s organ for promoting private sector investment
throughout the globe. Benchmarking was based on an extensive list of indicators, including the time
and cost to meet government requirements in business start-up, operation, trade, taxation, and closure.
They do not track variables such as macroeconomic policy, quality of infrastructure, currency volatility,
investor perceptions, or crime rates. Some 1,385 private companies in Thailand were included among 30,000
international companies surveyed. The report highlighted key areas that Thailand needed to improve to attract
more foreign investment in the future, particularly the length of business start-ups in the country which
normally takes 33 days, longer than Singapore and Hong Kong where new business start-ups take only 6 and 11 days
respectively. The long waits encountered in customs procedures–which take at least 22 days

were seen as a serious obstacle to Thailand’s flow of exports and imports. In comparison, Singapore’s customs
procedures take only three days for custom procedures for import and six days for export procedures,
the report said. Mr. Martin said lengthy customs procedures was not the major issue but the main obstacle
was investment volume. “The volume of private investment in Thailand has been at a low level since pre-1997
financial crisis, mainly are in real estate sector rather than the production sector,” Mr. Martin pointed out.
“In addition, he said, several factors that contributed to Thailand’s shortcomings for investment are business
regulations that impose unfavourable conditions for doing business, lack of skilled workers, higher wages and
insufficient utilities.” The World Bank economist urged Thailand to fine-tune its investment direction to
produce more innovative products and technology-savvy personnel to serve the nation’s 10th National Economic
and Social Development Plan which focused on economy driven by knowledge and innovations.

The report finds that the top 30 economies in the world are, in order, Singapore, New Zealand, the United States,
Canada, Hong Kong/China, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia, Norway, Ireland, Japan, Iceland, Sweden,
Finland, Switzerland, Lithuania, Estonia, Thailand, Puerto Rico, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Korea,
Latvia, Malaysia, Israel, St. Lucia, Chile, South Africa and Austria.

–TNA 2006-09-06

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