Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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331. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation her views on Ireland's fall to 18th on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business 2017 report, representing decline in consecutive years in this ranking; the steps being taken to improve competitiveness in this regard; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [34325/16]

Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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The Government’s Action Plan for Jobs, which is co-ordinated and developed by my Department since 2012, has set out a comprehensive set of measures to improve our competitiveness performance. Substantial progress has been made in terms of improving Ireland's competitiveness in recent years and we have climbed from 15^thto 7^thin the 2016 IMD competitiveness rankings. We have moved from 24^thto 23^rdin the WEF Competitiveness Report and we are now ranked 18ths out of 190 countries in the World Bank Doing Business report.

The World Bank's Doing Business report looks at domestic, primarily small and medium size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle. Based on standardised case studies, it presents quantitative indicators on business regulation that can be compared across 190 economies and over time. Doing Business goes beyond identifying that a problem exists and points to specific regulations or regulatory procedures that may lend them to reform.

In the 2017 report, Ireland’s was ranked 18^th– down 3 places, compared with our revised 2016 ranking. While this is disappointing, Ireland is ranked 8^th amongst EU member states. Doing Business also highlights many strengths – for example, we are ranked 5^thfor “paying taxes” and 10^thfor “starting a business”.

Furthermore, in terms of the Distance to Frontier benchmark - which measures Ireland’s score against the benchmark set by the best performing economy across ten different category headings – Ireland’s performance has actually improved slightly since 2016. Of course, other countries are also striving to improve their business environments, hence the improvement in our score but drop in our ranking.

This serves to remind us that competitiveness is a relative measure. The process of reform and improvement must be continuous.

I would also note that Ireland is a strong performer in other international competitiveness rankings – this year, for instance, we are ranked 7^thout of 61 countries in the IMD’s World Competitiveness Yearbook - an improvement of 9 places from last year.

In July of this year, the National Competitiveness Council published its annual Competitiveness Scorecardbenchmarking report which provides an in-depth assessment of all aspects of Ireland’s international competitiveness performance. The Council found that while Ireland’s competitiveness has improved in recent years –and has been central to recent strong economic growth, a number of threats persist, not least of which is Brexit.

The analysis contained in the Scorecard report is informing the development of the Council’s annual policy report Ireland’s Competitiveness Challenge 2016which I will shortly be brining to Government for consideration and which will contain a range of actions to enhance competitiveness.

My officials will continue to monitor publications such as the World Bank Doing Business report. Further actions and reforms - driven by the 2017 Action Plan for Jobs which is currently being prepared - will enable us to further narrow the gap with the world’s most competitive countries and improve the ease of doing business, ultimately helping us to achieve our objective of sustainable full employment.