The regulatory and business environment: Five strategic insights from B-READY 2025 report

Ghana’s aspiration to build a competitive, private sector-led economy requires a regulatory and business environment that enables firms to start, grow, innovate and trade efficiently. The World Bank’s new Business Ready (B-READY) 2025 Economy Profile of Ghana gives a timely look at how well the country’s regulatory and institutional systems support business activity. The B-READY framework is a more complete version of the old Doing Business index. It looks at more than just rules and regulations; it also looks at public services and the efficiency of policy implementation.

The B-Ready Report offers critical insights for policymakers, businesses, development partners, and countries seeking to advance economic competitiveness. While financial services emerge as the strongest infrastructural foundation with significant leverage potential, the findings highlight key areas requiring targeted reform to improve Ghana’s business environment. These include strengthening policy implementation, streamlining administrative procedures, modernizing government services through interoperable technology, addressing delays in import and export processes, and reinforcing competition policy. Below are five strategic policy insights Ghana can draw from the findings.

Ghana’s challenge is implementation, not policy design
A central finding of the B-Ready 2025 report is that Ghana performs relatively well in formulating laws and regulations that support business activity. However, performance drops significantly when it comes to public service delivery and the efficiency of implementation of those laws and regulations.
For example, Ghana has established many legal, institutional frameworks, and administrative procedures for businesses registration. Nonetheless, registering a company takes about 57 days for domestic firms and 67 days for foreign firms, which is much longer than in several peer countries such as Morocco, where it takes 28 days. Similarly, obtaining construction permits averages around 253 days in Ghana. This is about twice as long in countries like Côte d’Ivoire and Vietnam (World Bank, 2025).

Policies and support systems may exist on paper, but businesses frequently encounter delays, complex procedures, bureaucratic hurdles, and weak digital infrastructure when attempting to comply or access support. This drives up the cost of doing business, undermines compliance, and deters investment.

Bridging the gap between policy design and implementation should therefore be a central reform priority. This requires action on several fronts. Clear accountability comes first. Every policy needs a designated institution responsible for delivery. Without it, implementation stalls as agencies pass responsibility around. Alongside this, the government must invest in building the institutional capacity of implementing agencies, ensuring they have the right people, tools, and funding. Weak capacity remains one of the most common reasons good policies fail in practice.

Designated institutions must also work with stakeholders to translate policy into concrete operational plans, prioritizing high-impact reforms first to build momentum. Moreover, real-time monitoring is equally critical. The government needs regular reporting systems, business and citizen feedback channels, and independent reviews. This ensures implementation problems are caught early before they become costly.

Finally, sustained political and institutional will is non-negotiable. Many reforms stall not because of technical failure, but due to shifting priorities or political pressure. Development partners and businesses should actively support implementation efforts. Collectively, these actions will strengthen operational efficiency and deliver more effective policy outcomes.
Digitalization is central to improving government efficiency and public service delivery
Many of Ghana’s public service delivery challenges identified in the 2025 business environment assessment stem from slow administrative procedures and regulatory approvals. Registration, licensing, customs clearance, and tax administration remain key bottlenecks in the business environment.

Efforts to digitalize public services have made some progress, but significant gaps remain. Most digital systems are still siloed, incompatible, or ineffective. An online business registration platform exists but underperforms. Platforms for customs clearance and tax administration suffer from inconsistent effectiveness, low adoption, and poor feedback mechanisms. The root problem is a lack of interoperability, compounded by weak institutions.
Interoperable and scalable digital platforms can change this. By connecting systems and streamlining processes, digitalization can be optimized to make public services faster, more reliable, and more accessible for businesses. Integrating business registration, identification systems, customs clearance, tax administration, licensing and others is the direction Ghana’s digital infrastructure must go. When these systems work together seamlessly, businesses save time and money; and the cost of doing business falls.

The government must lead this drive, coordinating the shift toward unified digital infrastructure with businesses and development partners supporting the process. The goal is to improve public service delivery and reinforce a digital foundation that meaningfully strengthens the competitiveness of Ghanaian businesses.

However, technology alone is not a silver bullet. Digital systems are only as effective as the institutions behind them. Their true impact depends on strong governance, adequate resources, consistent enforcement, and sustained political will. Where these safeguards are weak, even well-designed platforms can be undermined by misuse, bureaucratic inertia, or neglect. In this regard, building interoperable digital systems is therefore not just a technology agenda. It is also a governance and economic reform agenda capable of bridging the gap between policy design and effective implementation.

Strengthening competition policy in relevant sectors is critical
Based on the 2025 B-Ready report, Ghana needs to improve its market competition policies. With a score of just 32 out of 100 on the market competition index, the country is among the lowest performers, sitting at the bottom 20percent. This indicates that current regulatory frameworks are insufficient to address anti-competitive practices including dominance in key sectors and barriers to entry covering licensing constraints, capital requirements, and regulatory favoritism. Market dominance in key sectors like telecoms and energy, as well as barriers to entry, can stifle innovation and make it hard for new businesses to thrive.

To foster a dynamic and competitive business environment, Ghana should strategically strengthen its competition laws and how they are enforced. In sectors where Ghana holds a competitive advantage, competition policy should be used deliberately to protect and scale local businesses. This means preventing market structures that crowd out Ghanaian firms and ensuring local players have the space to grow, consolidate, and compete regionally and globally. In other sectors where foreign and private participation can drive efficiency, lower prices, and improve quality; Ghana should leverage and use competition as a tool for development. Greater competition in these areas creates opportunities for SMEs, spurs innovation, and attracts investment.

The goal is not protection for its own sake, but a calibrated approach that uses competition law to build Ghanaian champions where it matters, while leveraging open markets where others can help. For Ghana to diversify its economy and boost entrepreneurship, this kind of strategic competition policy must be a priority.

Trade efficiency remains a structural constraint
Trade inefficiency remains a binding structural constraint on Ghana’s economic competitiveness. The B-READY report highlights inefficiencies in trade processes. Delays in import and export processes are costly to businesses and weaken Ghana’s position in regional and global markets. For instance, in the case of imports, border clearance in Ghana takes an average 14 days, compared to just 5 days in Morocco and 7 days in Vietnam (World Bank, 2025).

For Ghana to position itself as a regional trade and logistics hub, enhancing trade facilitation is critical. In the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), efficient modernization of customs processes, improvement of logistics systems and expansion of digital trade platforms or protocols will help improve value chain efficiency and cost minimization. These reforms will not only benefit exporters but also assist local industries that depend on imported inputs, thereby improving overall industrial productivity and competitiveness.

Strong financial infrastructure provides a strategic advantage
Ghana’s strong financial infrastructure represents a strategic advantage for private sector competitiveness and economic transformation within the West African subregion. The B-READY report identifies financial services as one of the country’s best-performing areas, with a score of 72 out of 100. This reflects significant progress in building financial infrastructure, particularly through the growth of digital payment systems, mobile money services, and interoperability of financial technology platforms. This strong foundation creates opportunities to expand financial inclusion, support SMEs, and foster innovation in fintech and digital entrepreneurship.

Importantly, this strength also positions Ghana to play a strategic role in AfCFTA. As cross-border trade expands across Africa, there will be increasing demand for reliable digital payment systems, cross-border financial services, and interoperable fintech platforms that facilitate trade between businesses in different countries. Ghana can take advantage of this opportunity by supporting high growth fintech companies to scale beyond the domestic market and provide digital financial services across Africa. By doing so, Ghanaian fintech firms can help address payment bottlenecks in intra-African trade while positioning the country as a regional hub for digital financial services under AfCFTA.

Conclusion
The B-READY Ghana 2025 report highlights that economic competitiveness depends not only on policies but on the institutions and systems that turn those policies into real opportunities. Ghana has made notable progress in developing regulatory frameworks, yet the next phase of reform must prioritise policy implementation, strengthen agencies and systems responsible for implementation, and enhance public service efficiency through interoperable digital systems.

The current government has been praised for its reform ambition. However, political will alone is insufficient. The more pressing question is whether that ambition is matched by the capacity to deliver. This means having adequate financial resources, a skilled workforce and institutional structures that are fit to deliver effectively. Fiscal pressures, gaps in public sector capacity and fragmented institutional coordination remain real and persistent obstacles.
The path forward demands both addressing these constraints directly and consistently pursuing such reform to create conditions that improve the business environment and generate sustainable employment. The B-READY report is therefore less a verdict on the present and more a measure of the distance still to travel.

References

• World Bank. (2025). Business Ready (B-READY) 2025: Economy Profile – Ghana. Washington, DC: World Bank.
• World Bank. (2024). Transforming Ghana in a Generation: 2025 Policy Notes. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Daniel Amewuda is a public policy and innovation expert specializing in digital economy, entrepreneurship, and youth employment. He works at the intersection of policy and practice to strengthen national digital and innovation ecosystems, support small and medium-sized enterprises, and expand digital skills to drive job creation and inclusive economic growth across Ghana and Africa. He can be reached via LinkedIn and or email: [email protected]

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