A recent article by The Latin American Corporate Counsel Association (LACCA) looked in depth at the challenges of doing business in Argentina and how it compares to other countries in the region.
In TMF Group’s global complexity report Argentina is ranked as the most complex regulatory country in the world; Global Head of Corporate Secretarial Services Thorold Youngman-Sullivan gives his view as to why.
The Global Benchmark Complexity Index ranks countries in terms of how difficult it is for companies to operate in them from a regulatory and compliance perspective.
By this measure, Argentina takes top spot as the most challenging country in which to do business. But results go even further, highlighting Latin America as the most difficult region in the world.
“Latin America as a region is complex, mainly due to the lack of a homogeneous regulatory framework,” says Thorold Youngman-Sullivan. “Argentina in particular is a vast country, divided into 23 provinces with a high level of regulatory and administrative barriers, all of which make it complex to operate in.”
Despite the obvious challenges in Argentina, our complexity study shows that the country is not isolated as a complex regime. Bolivia and Peru are close behind Argentina as the second and third most complex countries.
Overall, nine countries from the region are included in the top 20 most complex jurisdictions. Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are some of the countries that showed up as the most difficult in the survey, while Uruguay, Costa Rica and Panama are among the least complex out of the Latin American nations.
Youngman-Sullivan said that the fact that the top three positions are occupied by Latin American nations is not surprising “considering the isolated development of their legal systems and arguably the limited investment by the respective governments to modernise.”
Read the full article here.