Ease of starting a business
Administrative burden on setting up a company, scored 0 to 6 where lower is lighter.
Ease of starting a business
OECD scale 0 to 6, lower is less burden · 2023 edition, EU is a population-weighted mean of all 27 members
The story
On paper, Europe is not the problem. The administrative burden on setting up a company scores 1.94 across the EU against 2.03 in the United States and 2.18 in China, on a scale where lower is lighter. The average hides the real story: the spread inside Europe is wider than the gap to either competitor. Greece scores 0.53 and Estonia 0.86, while Cyprus and Romania sit at 3.30. A founder's experience of "Europe" depends entirely on which Europe they incorporate in.
Why it matters
Friction at day zero filters who founds at all. Every extra form, fee and week removes the founders with the least slack. But the deeper cost is fragmentation: a company formed under one national procedure still has to repeat the exercise to operate across the single market, which turns a light national burden into a heavy European one.
Policy context
The EU Inc. regulation, the so-called 28th regime tabled in March 2026, aims squarely at this number: one incorporation valid everywhere, within 48 hours, instead of 27 national procedures. If it lands, the effect should be visible here first, and in the internal spread rather than in the EU average.
How this number is calculated
OECD Product Market Regulation indicators, the administrative-burden measure for limited liability companies and personally owned enterprises, scored 0 to 6 where lower means less burden. Covers all 27 EU members plus the United States and China. The EU and D9+ readings are population-weighted means of their member states, the same convention this platform uses for other country-scored indices.
Two limitations worth stating. The OECD publishes this set roughly every five years, so the current 2023 edition is a structural snapshot, not a live reading, and several countries score identically to 2018. And the index is coded from national law by expert questionnaire, so it measures the rules as written rather than the experience of the founder who has to follow them.
The World Bank's Doing Business ranking, discontinued in 2021, and its successor B-READY were both considered. B-READY was rejected as the source: its published data covers neither the United States nor China, which makes the comparison this platform exists to draw impossible.
Source & cadence
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