The Impact of Business Environment Reforms on New Firm Registration

This paper uses panel data on the number of new firm registrations in 91 countries to study how the ease of registering a business and the magnitude of registration reforms affect new firm registrations. The authors find that the costs, days and procedures required to start a business are important predictors of the number of new firm registrations. However, they find that small reforms, in general less than a 40 percent reduction in procedures or 50 to 60 percent reduction in costs and days, do not have a significant effect on new registrations. They also find important synergies in multiple reforms of two or more business environment indicators. Finally, they show that countries with relatively weaker business environments prior to reforms require relatively larger reforms in order to impact the number of newly registered firms.