The 5 best countries for your startup

Wenhao Mo
Espionage
Published in
4 min readJan 8, 2019
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You probably know a country may play an enormous role in the future of a new business. Countries have different demand, different customers, different trends, and offer different opportunities for your product or service. Those things are extremely important, but there is no making a top-list based on these criteria, as they are subjective for any new enterprise.

What is not that subjective, though, is the business environment of the country: the rule of law, availability of credit, protection of investors’ rights, access to resources. Those factors are equally important for all start-ups, and they do vary from country to country.

Now, there is plenty of information on the topic, and a number of top-lists will pop-up in Google if you search for it. In fact, there is too much information, and it may be a bit hard to make sense of it. Today we are going to help you do just that.

We will go through several most famous rankings and statistics and try to explain them as plainly and easy as we can.

DOING BUSINESS

“Doing Business” is a publication of the World Bank Group and is a series of reports on the business environment of countries all over the world. If anything, the World Bank reports are always thorough, extremely detailed, and very long.

In 2019 the report looked at 11 indicators: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency.

Their 10 best countries were New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong, South Korea, Georgia, Norway, the US, the UK and Macedonia.

Doing Business, 2019

Although some countries on the list may not be commonly associated with business and start-ups, they are guaranteed to have some advantages. For instance, Georgia (along with New Zealand) has the lowest number of procedures to start a business. Macedonia, too, has very low requirements to start an enterprise, as well as very low land development fees.

WEF GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS REPORT

World Bank is not the only NGO that does reports for aspiring entrepreneurs: there is also World Economic Forum with its Global Competitiveness Report. Unlike Doing Business, Global Competitiveness is a little bit comprehensive and covers some more general indicators, looking at the overall performance of economy. It does include the potential for entrepreneurial activity and new business opportunities, so it can be helpful, too.

Global Competitiveness Report, 2018

Their top 10 from the last report is a little bit different from Doing Business, including the US, Singapore, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Netherlands, HK, the UK, Sweden and Denmark.

STARTUP RATE

Rankings are great, but they mostly look at the _potential_, and thus are in some way theoretical. Hight positions in rankings do not guarantee that there is a developed entrepreneurial culture in the country. But what countries have it?

Let’s look at the startup rate statistics — the percentage of adult population that is involved in the creation of a new business.

10 countries with the highest percentages are Canada, the US, India, Brazil, the UK, China, Germany, Japan, France, and Italy.

Statista, 2019

Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean those countries are objectively better for new businesses: maybe it’s just all about the culture and risky and entrepreneurial population. Sometimes the lower number may be present simply because the new businesses are not operated by the residents of a country.

But those are the real numbers, and they are worth noticing.

TOP 5

To compose the top 5 out of all this data, it seems reasonable to look at the countries that appear in the most of rankings, or at least in the 2 of them. Let’s have a look at the results!

1. Singapore.
Although the city-state did not appear in the startup rate graph, it has occupied the very top in both rankings, thus deserving the first place.

2. Hong-Kong.
Another Asian business hub, hitting all three rankings. Although it wasn’t present in the third one as an independent region, it does account for the large part of Chinese startups.

3. United States.
One of the richest countries in terms of new startups — and it rather predictably hit all three rankings.

4. United Kingdom.
Another Saxon country that successfully hit all the rankings of our article.

5. Germany.
Although it isn’t in top-10 of Doing Business, it hit top-3 of Global Competitiveness, and top-6 of startup rate. One of the strongest economies of Europe rightfully earns the 5thspot.

We understand that the final ranking might seem controversial — but so do all the rankings, and the final goal of the article was a bit different: to help you better understand the world of business rankings and reports. And we sure hope we did it good enough!

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