The Doing Business project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies andselected cities at the subnational and regional level.

The Doing Business project, launched in 2002, looks at domestic small and medium-size companies and measures the regulationsapplying to them through their life cycle.

Doing Business captures several important dimensions of the regulatory environment as it applies to local rms. It providesquantitative indicators on regulation for starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registeringproperty, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolvinginsolvency. Doing Business also measures features of labor market regulation. Although Doing Business does not present rankingsof economies on the labor market regulation indicators or include the topic in the aggregate distance to frontier score or ranking onthe ease of doing business, it does present the data for these indicators.

The Republic of Djibouti is located in the Horn of Africa between longitudes 41°8 ' and 43°4' E and the latitudes 10°9 ' and 12°7' N. It is bordered to north by Eritrea, to south-east by Somalia and to the west by Ethiopia. In the east, the country benefits from a seaside coast divided between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden and which extends on more than 372 km. It covers a surface area of 23 200 km² and has an estimated population of 900 000 people according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2014), growing at 2.9% per annum. More than 70% of the population lives in urban areas, with nearly 60% in the capital and about only 16.3 per cent of the population lives in the rural areas.