The World Bank Group's Doing Business 2019 report ranked Lebanon in 142nd place among 190 countries and jurisdictions worldwide and in 13th place among 22 Arab countries and territories in terms of the ease of doing business. Lebanon's global rank dropped six spots from 136th place in the 2018 survey, while its regional rank regressed by one notch year-on-year. Lebanon also came in 42nd place among 51 upper middle-income countries (UMICs) in the 2018 and 2019 surveys.

The index is a composite of 10 sub-indices of business regulations that track the time and cost to meet government requirements for business start-up, expansion, operations and insolvency. The ease of doing business rankings in the 2019 survey are based on the distance to frontier (DTF) score, which measures the gap between an economy's current performance and the best performer around the world on each sub-index. The DTF scores range from zero to 100, with a score of 100 representing the "frontier", or the best performer.

Lebanon's DTF score is 54.04, compared to 53.97 in the previous survey. It came below the Arab average score of 55.14 and significantly below the global average of 62.52. Lebanon was among 162 countries and territories that posted an increase in their DTF score in the 2019 survey. The World Bank indicated that Lebanon did not enact any reform related to the business environment between June 2, 2017 and May 1, 2018, while 128 of the 190 economies covered enacted at least one business regulation reform during the same period.

Globally, Lebanon had a better business environment than Tanzania, Mali and Nigeria, and a weaker business climate than Pakistan, Cambodia and Senegal among economies with a GDP of $10bn or more. It also ranked ahead of only Algeria, Gabon, Iraq, Equatorial Guinea, Libya and Venezuela among UMICs.