Enabling the business of agriculture 2016

Building on the progress report published in November 2014, Enabling the Business of Agriculture 2016: Comparing regulatory good practices provides a tool for policymakers to identify and analyze legal barriers for the business of agriculture and to quantify transaction costs of dealing with government regulations. The report presents the main results for 40 countries, for the first time using indicator scores to showcase good practices among countries in different stages of agricultural development. It also presents interesting results on the relationship between efficiency and quality of regulations, discriminatory practices in the laws and whether regulatory information is accessible. Regional, income-group and country-specific trends and data observations are presented on six topics: seed, fertilizer, machinery, finance, markets and transport. The report also discusses the continued development of several topics which will be added in future reports: information and communication technology, land, water, livestock, gender and environmental sustainability. Data are current as of 31 March, 2015.