As briefed by Press Secretary Andrei Savinykh on 8 July 2010

The World Banks has released the Investing Across Borders 2010 report highlighting measures taken by 87 countries to encourage FDI inflows.

Belarus has been outlined in the report as a country with impressive headway in attracting FDI.

In particular, Belarus has been listed as a regional leader in terms of how easy it is to set up a foreign firm. By this indicator, Belarus leapfrogged a few EU countries like Austria, UK, Spain, Ireland, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Czech Republic, France, as well as US and Japan.

Belarus boasts high ratings in terms of access of enterprises to acquiring land and by the aggregate indicators in this field is on the same level with the EU, US and Canada.

The report also highlights Belarus’ great strides in effective settlement of commercial disputes which is close to the average level in this regard across the EU and a bit behind of that in the UK, France, Austria and US.

The report indicators show that Belarus is well compared with the EU in terms of investment opportunities in different economic sectors.

We view the World Bank report as recognition of the efforts the Belarusian Government is taking and that its course towards further economic liberalization and favourable investment climate is totally right.

We want to stress however that this process is far from being over. In the mid-term, the Government will take a few more actions aimed to fulfill the task given by the President and that is shooting to the top 30 by doing business and investment opportunities across the globe.

In that context, we consider the World Bank report as a critical document with useful analytical data for our further work in this direction.