Despite several reforms, Vietnam has failed to get a higher rank in a World Bank’s annual report that documented business regulatory reforms worldwide last year.

This year’s report, the Doing Business 2014: Understanding Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises released Tuesday, ranks Vietnam 99 out of the 189 economies reviewed.

Last year the country was ranked 98/189.

“Vietnam improved its credit information system through a decree setting up a legal framework for the establishment of private credit bureaus,” the report reads.

It also indicates that Vietnam strengthened investor protections by “introducing greater disclosure requirements for publicly held companies in cases of related-party transactions.”

However, the country “made paying taxes more costly” for companies by increasing employers’ social security contribution rate, the report notes.

In terms of employing workers, World Bank said Vietnam “abolished priority rules for redundancy dismissals or layoffs and increased the minimum wage.”

Top 10 business-friendly economies

The 2014 Doing Business is the 11th in a series of annual reports on the ease of doing business, and it documented 238 business regulatory reforms worldwide last year, according to World Bank.

The report finds that the pace of business regulatory reform continues to accelerate following the financial crisis of 2008–09.

It also suggests that if economies around the world were to follow best practices in regulatory processes for starting a business, entrepreneurs would spend 45 million fewer days each year satisfying bureaucratic requirements.

“A better business climate that enables entrepreneurs to build their businesses and reinvest in their communities is key to local and global economic growth,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.

Kim added that the report “shows that economies with better business regulations are more likely to empower local entrepreneurs to create more jobs,” which he deemed another step in the right direction toward ending extreme poverty by 2030.

Singapore tops the global ranking on the ease of doing business, followed by Hong Kong SAR and China, and New Zealand.

Other nations listed in the top 10 economies with the most business-friendly regulations are the US, Denmark, Malaysia, South Korea, Georgia, Norway, and the UK.

In addition to the global rankings, the report also names the economies that have improved the most on the indicators since the previous year.

The 10 economies topping that list this year are (in order of improvement) Ukraine, Rwanda, the Russian Federation, the Philippines, Kosovo, Djibouti, Côte d’Ivoire, Burundi, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Guatemala.

Yet challenges persist: five of this year’s top improvers—Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, the Philippines, and Ukraine—are still in the bottom half of the global ranking on the ease of doing business.