EDITOR’S NOTE: World Bank crooks must be chewing khat with Meles.

ADDIS ABABA (Fortune) — A new report on ease of doing business around the world has been published by the World Bank and it shows that Ethiopia has improved its environment for doing business with the country moving up nine places on the index table from position 116 to 107. Wow! Incredible!

[The truth of the matter is that Ethiopia’s economy under the Woyanne tribal junta is growing down like a carrot.]

The development comes barely a month after another World Bank report on competitiveness where Ethiopia’s business environment was found wanting in many areas.

“Ethiopia reduced court delays through a combination of better case management and internal training, as well as an expanded role for enforcement judges. The government has simplified property transfers by decentralizing administrative tasks to sub-cities and merging procedures performed by the land registry and municipalities,” said World Bank in a report released in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, September 9, 2009.

Reforms at the company registry and the streamlining of procedures have also made it easier to start a business in Ethiopia over the past year, says the report compiled by the Bank’s branch, the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Ethiopia has over the past year ranked poorly on the index as it moved from 109 in 2008 to 116 in this year, 2009.

“Major areas of reform [in 2008/2009] have been in areas of starting a business, registering property, and enforcing contracts,” the Bank notes in the report.

Ethiopia is also named to have lowered taxes on domestic firms in 2008/2009.

This new report vindicates State Minister of Trade and Industry Tedesse Hailu, who on August 20, 2009, doubted the findings of the first World Bank report titled Ethiopia Investment Climate: Towards the Competitive Frontier which showed that government preferences, access to capital, coupled with low productivity, low wages, land allocation and inefficiency in allocation of resources were some factors that were slowing down Ethiopia’s competitiveness to attract business and investment on the world market.

The Trade and Industry Minister indicated that Ethiopia was improving in many areas like making resources such as land available to investors and reforming some of its trade rules.

“This is good development for Ethiopia as 2009 was difficult year for many countries,” an economist told Fortune on Wednesday, September 9, 2009.

The Bank dubbed 2009 as a year of fast-paced reform with 67 regulatory reforms recorded in 29 of 46 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Doing Business 2010: ‘Reforming through Difficult Times’, as the report is named, is the seventh in a series of Doing Business annual reports published by IFC and the World Bank.

For the first time a Sub-Saharan African country-Rwanda-was the world’s top reformer, based on the number and impact of reforms implemented between June 2008 and May 2009. Rwanda, a repeat reformer, reformed in seven of the 10 business regulation areas measured by Doing Business.

It now takes a Rwandan entrepreneur just two procedures and three days to start a business. Imports and exports are more efficient, and transferring property takes less time thanks to reorganized registries and statutory time limits. Investors have more protection, insolvency reorganization has been streamlined, and a wider range of assets can be used as collateral to access credit.

Mauritius, ranked 17 of the 183 economies covered by the report, is the top Sub-Saharan economy for the second year in a row in terms of the overall regulatory ease of doing business. It adopted a new insolvency law, established a specialized commercial division within the court, eased property transfers and expedited trade processes.

“In times overshadowed by the global financial and economic crisis, business regulation can make an important difference for how easy it is to reorganize troubled firms to help them survive, to rebuild when demand rebounds, and to get new businesses started,” said Penelope Brook, acting vice president for Financial and Private Sector Development at the World Bank Group in a statement made available to Fortune on Wednesday.

Doing Business analyzes regulations that apply to an economy’s businesses during their life cycles, including start-up and operations, trading across borders, paying taxes, and closing a business. Doing Business does not measure all aspects of the business environment that matter to firms and investors.

For example, it does not measure security, macroeconomic stability, corruption, skill level, or the strength of financial systems.

“The report shows that some post conflict economies [like Ethiopia and Rwanda] in the region are actively improving the regulatory framework for private sector-led development,” said Brooks.

By Kevin J. Kelley

NAIROBI (The East African) — The government’s emphasis on ethnic identity could trigger a “violent eruption” in the run-up to Ethiopia’s scheduled elections in June, an international conflict-prevention group warned in a report last week.

“Paranoia” on the part of the former guerrilla fighters who now lead the country is cited as an impediment to a democratic system.

The ruling party’s “obsession with controlling political processes from the federal to the local level” is inciting opposition groups to consider taking up arms, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group says.

“Without genuine multiparty democracy,” the report suggests, “the tensions and pressures in Ethiopia’s polities will only grow, greatly increasing the possibility of a violent eruption that would destabilize the country and region.”

The report is intended to pressure Ethiopia’s leading benefactors to tie development aid more closely to political reform.

“Some donors appear to consider food security more important than democracy in Ethiopia, but they neglect the increased ethnic awareness and tensions created by the regionalisation policy and their potentially explosive consequences,” the Crisis Group says.

Ethiopia ranks as one of the United States’ chief allies in Africa. Washington annually provides Addis Ababa with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid while defending the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front from charges such as those levelled by the Crisis Group.

The Crisis Group’s report acknowledges that Ethiopia has made economic progress under the rule of the party that overthrew a repressive Marxist-Leninist regime 18 years ago. The report also refrains from questioning the government’s motives in promoting a system of ethnic federalism.

“But while the ruling EPRDF Tigrean People Liberation Front promises democracy,” the 40-page analysis continues, “it has not accepted that the opposition is qualified to take power via the ballot box and tends to regard the expression of differing views and interests as a form of betrayal.”

Feeling threatened by the emergence of a significant opposition, the ruling party resorted to repressive measures prior to the 2005 national elections.One paradoxical aspect of the report is its finding that the ruling party’s authoritarian actions have not prevented opposition groups from proliferating in recent years.

This broadening of the political spectrum, coupled with the promotion of ethnic awareness and the government’s unwillingness to share power, are identified by the Crisis Group as the factors that could push Ethiopia to a break point.