Grace Amianti and Marchio Irfan Gorbiano, Jakarta – Indonesia has progressed significantly in deregulating its economy as its ranking in the Ease of Doing Business (EODB) index for 2018 has climbed 19 places to 72 from its previous rank of 91, the World Bank announced Wednesday.

In its annual flagship EODB report, the World Bank announced that Indonesia placed just below Oman in 71st and above El Salvador (73rd), but that the country's ASEAN neighbors placed higher at 26th, 24th and 68th respectively for Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The report claimed that "getting electricity", one of the reforms the bank researched, showed significant improvement in Indonesia, as it scored 83.87 percent in distance to frontier (DTF).

The DTF score helps assess the absolute level of regulatory performance over time, measuring the distance of each economy to the "frontier", which represents the best performance observed since 2005 on each of the indicators across all economies in the EODB sample.

An economy's DTF is reflected on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 representing the lowest performance and 100 representing the frontier.

The latest progress in Indonesia's EODB ranking was still far from President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's ambitious index target of 40.

Last year, in the World Bank's "Doing Business 2017: Equal Opportunity for All", Indonesia jumped 15 places to 91st from 106th.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/11/01/indonesia-jumps-19-places-in-eodb-2018-wb.html