While World Bank discontinued its ‘Doing Business Report’ (DBR) due to methodological issues, especially with regard to ranking countries, it has now come up with an improved ‘Business Ready’ (or simply ‘B-Ready’ as the World Bank calls it) report, which was launched recently. A December 12, ‘Bretton Woods Project’ published article ‘The B-Ready index: The World Bank’s bluewashing of labour rights’ favoured the approach taken by this report as follows: ‘Promising a more comprehensive assessment of countries’ business environments, the new index goes beyond considering only the regulatory environment and includes measures of the quality of public services and enterprise survey data.’
Having said that, the same article was critical of its certain aspects including ‘The index revives the controversial ‘employing workers’ indicator– previously removed from the DBR after years of criticism from the global labour movement and international organisations for rewarding countries with the lowest level of regulations, including violators of workers’ rights– which is intended to make their economies friendlier to business.’
To give some perspective as to why the previous report in this regard was discontinued, a statement from the World Bank that it released on 16 September 2021 indicated ‘After data irregularities on Doing Business 2018 and 2020 were reported internally in June 2020, World Bank management paused the next Doing Business report and initiated a series of reviews and audits of the report and its methodology. In addition, because the internal reports raised ethical matters, including the conduct of former Board officials as well as current and/or former Bank staff, management reported the allegations to the Bank’s appropriate internal accountability mechanisms. After reviewing all the information available to date on Doing Business, including the findings of past reviews, audits, and the report the Bank released today on behalf of the Board of Executive Directors, World Bank Group management has taken the decision to discontinue the Doing Business report.’
Highlighting one of the ways in which this report is an improvement over DBR, it notes that it is more inclusive, taking input from beyond the World Bank. It was indicated in the ‘Business Ready’ report in this regard as ‘It replaces and improves upon the World Bank Group’s earlier Doing Business project… It reflects a more balanced and transparent approach toward evaluating an economy’s business and investment climate, building on recommendations from hundreds of experts from within and outside the World Bank Group, including from governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations.’
The ‘B-Report’ focuses on three broad aspects or pillars, which are pointed out in the report as ‘(I) Regulatory Framework, (II) Public Services, and (III) Operational Efficiency.’ Here, it needs to be indicated that instead of publishing an overall country ranking, on the basis of how easy it was to do business in a particular country, it reflects on important country aspects related to business on a more disaggregated level, and places them in one of the five groups (or quintiles), where groups are indicated as ‘Top’, ‘Second’, ‘Third’, ‘Fourth’, and ‘Bottom’.
B-READY combines primary data collected from thousands of specialists – each an expert in the private sector of a specific economy – with data collected directly from businesses operating in that economy. To accomplish this, B-READY uses expert questionnaires tailored to collect data for the Regulatory Framework and Public Services pillars from specialists in each topic. The questionnaires are administered to three to five experts per questionnaire and economy.
Countries are assessed over the three aspects (indicated above), where the best performing countries are placed in the ‘Top’ quintile, and so forth. Moreover, among other improvements over the DBR, it does not rely for its data on just main one or two cities, but has a more expanded coverage, which makes it more representative of the overall ground realities of a particular country, with regard to how conducive they are for doing business.
The Report indicated in this regard ‘Doing Business assessed economies’ performance based on rankings and scores, focusing on aggregate rankings to drive public interest and motivate reforms. B-READY uses quantifiable disaggregated indicators, aggregating points into scores by topic and pillar. This approach identifies specific areas for reform and encourages reforms without overhyping economywide rankings. While Doing Business covered the main business city in 191 economies and the second-largest business city in 11 economies, B-READY aims for wide coverage within and across economies, with coverage for different topics based on whether regulations are national or local.’
Among 50 countries, on which the ‘B-Report’ is based, for instance, Pakistan falls in the ‘Fourth’ quintile– or the second last group in terms of performance, and hence needs to improve a lot– for both pillars 1 and 2, that is ‘Regulatory Framework’– in which it received a score of 59.10, while the best performing country, Hungary, received 78.23 score– and ‘Public Services’– where Pakistan received a score of 44.97 (Estonia came first with a score of 73.31)– respectively, while for the third aspect or pillar ‘Operational Efficiency’ it performed better, and fell in the ‘Third’ quintile (Pakistan scored 65.90 score here, while Singapore, which came number one here, scored 87.33); although here too the country needs to make a lot of progress.
Here, with regard to how scoring is done, the ‘B-Ready’ report indicated ‘For each economy, B-READY produces two sets of scores: one consisting of 10 topic scores and another comprising three pillar scores. Topic and pillar scores can range from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 100. For topic scores, every score is generated by averaging the scores assigned to each of the three pillars (Regulatory Framework, Public Services, Operational Efficiency) for that topic. Within these pillars, common features inform the grouping into a particular category. Each category contains a number of subcategories. In turn, each subcategory contains a number of indicators.’
Moreover, how scores are reached at, the Report indicated as follows: ‘B-READY combines primary data collected from thousands of specialists – each an expert in the private sector of a specific economy – with data collected directly from businesses operating in that economy. To accomplish this, B-READY uses expert questionnaires tailored to collect data for the Regulatory Framework and Public Services pillars from specialists in each topic. The questionnaires are administered to three to five experts per questionnaire and economy.
Additionally, the World Bank Enterprise Surveys directly collect data from businesses for indicators within the Operational Efficiency pillar. The project also uses expert questionnaires to collect data on Operational Efficiency indicators not routinely faced by firms themselves, in topics such as Business Entry and Business Insolvency, because ad hoc surveys would be prohibitively expensive.’
