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Starting a Business in Laos From: USA, et al. (several
e-mailers)
Inquiry:
I am interested in starting a business in
Laos. Could you provide links that will point me into the
right direction?
Reply:
The following
links provide a great deal of information on setting up a business
and laws pertaining to investment, etc.
Dept. of Domestic & Foreign Investment
http://invest.laopdr.org/
Lao National Chamber of Commerce & Industry
http://www.lncci.laotel.com/
Ministry of Commerce
http://www.moc.gov.la/
Lao Trade Promotion Center
http://www.laotrade.gov.la/ (defunct right now but was previously working and may eventually be brought back, keep it for possible future reference.)
Ease of Doing Business in Laos From: USA
Inquiry:
Aside
from anecdotal evidence of how easy or hard it is to do business
in Laos, do you know of any actual research or references that
would back up either side of good or bad. For example, there
are measurements of how transparent a country is, how much paper
work is involved in doing business in a particular country,
etc. Your advice is much appreciated.
Reply:
Definitely finding out the ease or difficulty of doing business in a
particular country is very important to know.
The World
Bank's Doing Business* statistics has posted some fascinating data in regards to
the ease or difficulty of doing business in different
countries. The most recent report, 2005, stated the following
for Laos:
Starting a
business in Laos requires 9 steps over an average of 198 days
and a deposit of 23.4% of gross national income per capita (GNI)
required to obtain business registration number
To comply
with licenses and permits there were 24 steps in the procedure
taking 208 days to complete
Registering
and securing property took 9 steps and approximately 135 days
Payment of
taxes were on average 24.7% of gross profit for an average
medium sized company with a total of 31 payments
I should also
add however that many people, regardless of how difficult it is or
how much paperwork is involved, still continue to invest and also
start up businesses in Laos. In many of these instances the
reason for investing usually stems from a love for the country,
personal relationship with someone there, a keen interest in
exploiting a small but growing economy, or because they are of Lao
heritage and want to enter local/national commerce. Whatever
their reasons may be, I think it is a positive sign that foreign
investors continue to consider Laos for investment. Moreover,
aside from infusing capital into the country, it encourages opening
of the economy and the country. However, it definitely still
needs to do more to encourage even more investment comparable to its
neighbours.
