Costs of Economic Fragmentation Include Moving to Hard-to-Work Places

Global supply chains are realigning through geopolitically neutral economies to boost resilience and hedge dependencies on the US and China. In some cases, though, shifting to new places comes with a costly drawback: extra red tape.

Four of nine so-called bridge nations — a grouping Bloomberg dubbed “connectors” in an analysis last year — were among the world’s top 20 most complex jurisdictions in which to start and operate a business, according to TMF Group, which released its 2024 Global Business Complexity Index this week. None of the other five ranked in the top 10 least complex.