The uphill struggle gets harder

Poland has tumbled down the World Bank rankings as a place to do business after slumping from 45th position in 2005 to 54th place this year.

The World Bank's assessment of 155 nations looked at key business regulations and reforms. It found that Polish entrepreneurs struggle most when it comes to dealing with licenses, taxes and actually starting the business.

According to the Doing Business in 2006 report in Poland it takes 322 days to obtain a license for the construction of a warehouse, compared to 56 days in Finland - the winner in this category. In order to set up a new company, the businessperson-to-be has to come up with a share capital amounting to some zł.40,000, which accounts for 220 percent of the annual GDP per capita, whereas in Russia one only needs 80 percent and as little as EUR 1 in France.

Overall, the European nations were the most active in implementing reforms. The top 10 reformers in the past year, in order, were Serbia and Montenegro, Georgia, Vietnam, Slovakia, Germany, Egypt, Finland, Romania, Latvia and Pakistan. Poland managed to reduce delays in courts and improve business licensing procedures thanks to the newly passed Freedom of Economic Activity Act but, unlike in 2005, it didn't make it to the top 10 reformers list.

"The main obstacles for doing business in Poland are taxes, legal regulations and the omnipotent administration. Tax authorities tend to treat every entrepreneur as a potential perpetrator and the new regulations long ago stopped to be coherent with the existing ones. Why? Enough to glance at the level of education in Polish Sejm," said Krzysztof Borusowski, an Adam Smith Center analyst.

Surprisingly, the top 30 economies in the world in terms of the report's ease-of-doing-business include the three Baltic countries, which is a remarkable achievement, as only a decade has passed since they first began reforms.