If you are interested in understanding why some countries remain poor — or even get poorer — a crucial factor is the ease or difficulty of entrepreneurship. Many countries in Latin America are poor. Not surprisingly, most of them look quite bad in the World Bank’s “Doing Business” rankings. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady discusses the connection in her column.
According to the World Bank, incidentally, the best place for doing business is Singapore. New Zealand comes in second, followed by the U.S. The areas where the U.S. does not look so good are these: paying taxes (76), dealing with licenses (24), closing a business (18), and trading across borders (15).
Leftists love to believe that capitalism is what keeps people in poor nations from advancing, but it turns out that it’s the absence of capitalism that does so — an absence caused by the authoritarian and often corrupt rulers and their minions.
