Survey under way to assess Seychelles’ business climate |12 March 2012

The WEF is an independent organisation committed to improve the state of the world by engaging business and political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

The report aims to mirror the business operating environment and competitiveness of over 140 economies worldwide.

It offers a unique benchmarking tool to the public and private sectors as well as academia and civil societies.

The WEF, through the Centre for Global Competitiveness and Performance, works with a network of partners as well as leading academics worldwide to ensure the latest thinking and research on global competitiveness are incorporated into its reports.

The Plutus Auditing Firm in Seychelles has been appointed by them as an affiliated partner in Seychelles to facilitate the survey. 

The Seychelles Investment Board (SIB) is however actively engaging itself in the process to ensure that the survey forms are properly distributed and that information provided is validated.

“Seychelles is currently being ranked internationally by various organisations for its economic and business climate,” says Sherin Renaud, SIB’s chief executive.

“The World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business’ Report is another example.”
According to Mrs Renaud, these ranking are becoming remarkably more and more important, that investors, international organisations and donors are looking at those rankings to base their investment decisions on. 

To this effect, the SIB, which as part of its mandate is to build the image of the country, has made it an absolute requirement to be engaged in those surveys being carried out in Seychelles.

The SIB says that last year when it started to comprehensively examine the World Bank ‘Ease of Doing business’ Report and through interaction with the World Bank team based in Washington, it learned that some of the poor rankings of certain indicators are partly due to wrong information provided on the form by business individuals and subsequent to that a lack of validating process for those information.

The next Report of the World Economic Forum is expected to be released in December this year and Seychelles are expected to feature in there.

The survey is currently taking place and the SIB is appealing to the business community engaged in the survey for their full cooperation.