Dimension 4 assesses the availability, quality and responsiveness of key government services for SMEs, focusing on digital government services, company registration, business licensing and tax compliance procedures.
The WBT economies have continued developing and implementing their policy frameworks for digital government services for businesses. Several economies have made efforts to increase inter-institutional co-ordination for these processes, which should allow them to accelerate and streamline the rollout of digital government services and improve standards for service delivery. All economies have continued the development of their online portals for digital government services, increasing their accessibility. Reforms to simplify and digitalise company registration processes and increase interoperability in this regard have been undertaken to reduce the number of days and procedures required to start a business. While business licencing has been centralised in all WBT economies, deregulation and digitalisation reforms are ongoing to reduce administrative barriers for businesses. Furthermore, comprehensive sets of tax measures to reduce liquidity constraints for SMEs have been introduced to mitigate the impact of the COVID‑19 crisis. Simplified bookkeeping rules for SMEs are common throughout the region, and digital services are widely used for business taxation.
The WBT economies should ensure that digital government services are tailored to the needs of businesses, and increasingly integrate user feedback into the service design process, as digitalisation presents a unique window of opportunity to optimise and streamline services. There is also significant opportunity to be found in adopting proactive policies to encourage the use of open government data by businesses to create new products and services and drive innovation. Improving monitoring and evaluation systems for digital government services, company registration and business licensing will be key to measuring their success and identifying areas for improvement. Moreover, economies across the region should evaluate and simplify their tax regimes so they take the average profitability of business sectors into account, do not create hurdles to growing into the standard tax regime and do not take the number of employees as an eligibility criterion.