Azerbaijan's 2008 Single-Window Reform — A Record 64-Place Jump in Global Business Rankings

On 1 January 2008, Azerbaijan replaced a multi-agency business registration process — which had separately involved the Ministry of Justice, tax authorities, the Social Insurance Fund and the Statistics Committee — with a 'single window' principle under which the Ministry of Taxes became the sole body legally required to register all types of commercial legal entities, and to do so within three business days.
The World Bank's Doing Business 2009 report recorded Azerbaijan jumping from 97th to 33rd place out of 181 economies in the overall ease-of-doing-business ranking — a 64-place, one-year gain the World Bank described as a world record, with improvements in seven of ten indicators including registering a business (+53), employing workers (+52), registering property (+54) and paying taxes (+41), according to Jamestown Foundation reporting on the World Bank's findings.
On the specific registration-time metric, Azerbaijan's average fell to roughly 3 days, against a regional East European average of about 22.6 days at the time, generating a reported 40% increase in new business registrations in the first three months after the reform, per contemporaneous US government (export.gov) trade reporting.
The reform proved durable rather than one-off: World Bank data shows Azerbaijan still ranked among the global 'top ten reformers' as late as the Doing Business 2020 report (28th of 190 economies, score 78.5), over a decade after the initial single-window change.
Caution: the 2009 ranking jump reflected a bundle of simultaneous reforms (registration, property, labour, tax), so the single-window measure alone cannot be credited with the full ranking gain; the World Bank discontinued the Doing Business methodology in 2021 after an internal data-integrity review of unrelated country scores, which — while not implicating Azerbaijan's figures specifically — is a reason to treat any single Doing Business ranking as indicative rather than definitive.

Read the full analysis: https://archive.doingbusiness.org/en/reforms/overview/economy/azerbaijan