Easy Street

Congratulations! You've determined that your product can be sold abroad. But how do you find the best country in which to do business?

Start with the World Bank Group's Doing Business 2007: How to Reform, which ranks 175 nations based on the ease of doing business in each. The index averages the percentile rankings of 10 equally weighted topics:

• Starting a business
• Dealing with licenses
• Employing workers
• Registering property
• Getting credit
• Protecting investors
• Paying taxes
• Trading across borders
• Enforcing contracts
• Closing a business

Accordingly, the top 10 foreign countries for ease of doing business are:

1. Singapore
2. New Zealand
3. Canada
4. Hong Kong
5. United Kingdom
6. Denmark
7. Australia
8. Norway
9. Ireland
10. Japan

For more information, visit www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings. Click on the column headers to sort the data by topic.

This article was originally published in the June 2007 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Easy Street.