New Zealand has the world’s sixth-best “trade enabling” economy

The World Economic Forum’s “Global Enabling Trade Report 2010” has New Zealand ranked as the economy with the sixth-best conditions for trade, up from eleventh in the 2009 report. 

The report, which was launched in 2008, now covers 125 economies and is intended to provide a yardstick of the extent to which economies have in place the necessary attributes for enabling trade and to show where improvements are most needed.

At the core of the report is the ‘enabling trade index’ that measures those attributes across four major themes: market access; border administration; transport and communications infrastructure; and business environment.

New Zealand’s best result came in the area of ‘transparency of border administration’ where it was rated as the most trade enabling country in the world.

The top positions in the 2010 report were occupied by Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland respectively.