Could Africa be more competitive than Germany, Japan or France?

For the continent traditionally seen as the worst investment bet worldwide, the idea seems improbable.

But according to the World Bank's 2008 Doing Business report, which ranks 178 countries for the regulatory ease of doing business, it isn't such a wild thought.

The highest ranking African countries were Ghana, Kenya and Mauritius, which came 27th. But according to the string of experts and senior businessmen who came to congratulate those three finance ministers on Friday at consumer goods giant Unilever's London headquarters, the building blocks are there to do much better.

If a single African country were to incorporate the best practices that are already in place across the sub-Sahara region, they said, it would rank eighth worldwide -- better than many of the world's leading economies.

"Africa has already shown what is possible -- it does not need to look far for models for reform," said Michael Klein, vice president for financial and private-sector development at the World Bank.

In general, African countries are seen as riddled with red tape and corruption. Firms complain it can take months or years to get essential permits -- or it may prove simply impossible. But Ghana, Kenya and Mauritius in particular were praised for their efforts to make investment easier.

Most of the chief executives, chairmen and other senior figures -- including the finance ministers -- at the event said repeatedly they believed the private sector, not government aid or the western NGO world, were the best hope of pulling the world's poorest countries out of poverty.

"Africa's prosperity and stability will not come from dependency on foreign aid but from sustained, productive private investment," Parliamentary Under Secretary Of State Shriti Vadera for the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) told the conference. "This will require investment in good governance, in decent infrastructure and the provision of a reliable, good quality workforce."

She pointed out that both India and China had managed their current rates of rapid economic growth without much recourse to foreign aid -- although this did not mean that development aid was useless.

Perhaps inevitably, Klein said countries such as Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola with large amounts of natural resources had less incentive to cut bureaucratic red tape -- with a global commodity boom, mining companies were likely to try and come in regardless of the obstacles.

The two least friendly countries for doing business in the world were Zimbabwe and Venezuela, he said. They were unable to survey Somalia.

After Zimbabwe's seizure of white owned farms, few western owned businesses feel safe in the country. The same might be true of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, where the socialist president has scared investors away, but the Latin American country is much better able to stand without foreign investment given its huge oil reserves and high global oil prices. In contrast, Zimbabwe has the world's highest inflation and is widely described as being on the brink of total collapse.

While some have long seen them as plundering Africa's resources for their own financial gain, senior figures from some of the world's largest companies and corporations painting themselves -- at least in part - as the solution.

"Aid isn't the answer," Michael Pragnell, chief executive of Swiss agrochemicals giant Syngenta, told AlertNet. "It goes on corruption, they get dependent on it. The answer has to come from the private sector."

Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.