KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia has been ranked 23rd out of 190 economies in the World Bank Doing Business 2017 Report released this morning.
Based on improved measurements, Malaysia had slipped by a rung from 22nd out of 189 economies in 2016 with a distance to frontier score of 78.18.
This compares with the old methodology (using percentile ranking) where Malaysia was ranked 18th in the 2016 rankings.
In the latest ranking, New Zealand overtook Singapore for the top placing while Denmark clinched the third position.
Malaysia Productivity Corporation director general Datuk Mohd Razali Hussain explained that the World Bank revised the methodology used in 2014, with its first revision in 2014 followed by the second revision in 2015, and the third revision the year after.
Under the new methodology, distance to frontier has been used. The distance to frontier or DTF identifies the gap between an economy's performance and best practices across the entire sample of 45 sub-indicators (of the total 11 indicators).
Under the old methodology, Malaysia was ascending the rankings from 25th in 2007 to 6th in 2014.
According to Razali, the paying taxes indicator has been expanded to cover post filing processes such as tax refunds and gender dimension for indicators like starting a business, registering property and enforcing contracts.
On the scores, he said Malaysia achieved a country-high distance to the frontier score for getting electricity with a score of 94.34 (compared to South Korea's 99.88 score).
"We have also shown improvements in indicators such as getting credit, protecting minority investors, starting a business (cost) and payment taxes (number of payments).
Razali said focus groups with members from the various ministries and government agencies under the Special Task Force to Facilitate Business (Pemudah) ambit will address how to improve the rankings.
The report ranks Malaysia ahead of economies such as Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, China, France, Switzerland and India.
Within Asean, Malaysia ranks second after Singapore.