Doing Business 2020: Mexico improves its score but slips in the rankings

June 2020

In this year’s report, Doing Business 2020: Comparing Business Regulation in 190 Economies, Mexico fell a disappointing six places in the global rankings. Despite a slight increase in its overall score for ease of doing business from last year’s 72.1% to 72.4%, Mexico declined to an overall position of 60th from last year’s 54th.  
 
Mexico’s scores in eight of the ten categories were broadly in line with last year. Elsewhere, Mexico did make a significant improvement in its score for Protecting Minority Investors, improving from 58.3% to 62.0% and climbing from 72nd to 61st position. However, this was balanced by a deterioration in its score for Paying Taxes, which fell from 66.7% to 65.8%, taking Mexico to a lowly 120th position. Despite this somewhat lacklustre performance, Mexico held onto its top spot in the Latin America and Caribbean region; however, Puerto Rico and Columbia are close behind in 2nd and 3rd places. Mexico is still a sizeable twelve percentage points outside the ten highest-ranking global economies.  
 
More broadly, New Zealand and Singapore maintain their places in the top two, but Hong Kong moves up one place into third, with Denmark dropping to fourth.  The ten most-improved nations were: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Togo, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, China, India, and Nigeria.  
 
Doing Business 2020 is the seventeenth annual report published by the World Bank. It measures reforms and regulations implemented in 190 economies across the globe over a 12-month period that ended on 1 May 2019. Russell Bedford International is a global contributor to the report and has helped the World Bank in researching its annual Paying Taxes survey since 2009. Many Russell Bedford member firms also took part as regional contributors to the report. 
 
Based in Mexico City, Russell Bedford Mexico was an active contributor to Doing Business 2020. Javier Jiménez commented: “Falling six places while slightly improving the overall score tells a story: other countries are improving faster than Mexico. In fact, Mexico sat in 38th position in 2016 but has declined ever since then. It offers some comfort that Mexico is still the best place to do business in the Latin America and Caribbean region but, to maintain this status, Mexico must turn the tide and start climbing the rankings again.”