The Daily Brief – Ecuador dramatically accelerates the new business start-up

Heard of zero-to-60? Well, how about zero-to-six? If President Rafael Correa has his way that is exactly what Ecuadorian business owners will soon be experiencing. In an effort to streamline and dramatically accelerate the new business start-up process, President Correa has launched a campaign to cut the full time to set up an Ecuadorian company down to 6 hours. Now, grant you, if you are a sole proprietorship, or want to establish a small service entity, your wait time was already fairly small and efficient. However, for larger, more complex corporations, or those outside the service sector, many previously had to wait anywhere between 35-55 days, for full approval ! President Correa said it was time to “change the view”.

Citing a bureaucracy mired in an apparent effort to create obstacles, Correa suggested that the amount of bureaucratic procedures needed to be drastically cut and thoroughly simplified, as found in other progressive South American countries such as Uruguay and Chile.  This change President Correa cited lay against the backdrop of an archaic system requiring 13 steps to process a new business entity and generating an excessive, “cost to time wasted”.

Among 174 nations, Ecuador had been ranked as low as 169 in terms of obstacles to set up a new mid-sized or larger corporation. With this latest proposal, Ecuador will vault passed nations such as Chile and Uruguay, who now take approximately 7 days to establish a company, with a new on-line process designed to accomplish the same in six hours within Ecuador. The former cumbersome 13-step process will be rapidly reduced to one step, achieving the zenith of vaunted capitalist efficiency. Ecuador’s economic path to success had already become significantly brighter, but now it has also been placed on the fast-track to reality.