Ease of Doing Business Rank

If you are wondering why your country is not at the top of the innovation heap, take a look at these rankings. Of particular importance for software startups are Starting a Business, Employing Workers, Getting Credit, and Enforcing Contracts. High numbers imply to me bureaucracy and/or corruption. There is a thread about getting rich in China. At 151, 111, 59, 18 it's difficult for the average, but bright, Joe.

I remember reading elsewhere about how long and how much it takes to get a business license. In California it took me 2 hours and $124. In Germany it was months and $20k (mostly band deposit requirements). In some African countries it was years.

Some of these numbers aren't quite right - USA scores at "best possible" for employing workers, when hiring foreigners is a dreadful pain in the neck, you have to deal with withholding/payroll taxes/unemployment insurance, and there's differences in 50 states' employment codes you need to be aware of and get in line with. Then you have union codes, labor codes that are sometimes arbitrary (x person has a legally mandated break every y hours, even if they don't want it, and the company is fined if the employee isn't forced to take it - yet a virtually equivalent job might have no such codes/requirements).

America's a nice place to live, and certainly there's a lot of liberty here, but however they defined their criteria of how easy it is to employ people, it doesn't accurately reflect that America is not, in fact, the easiest place in the world to employ people.