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1 1 (October 29, 2021)

handle is hein.crs/goveesl0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional Research Service The World Bank's Doing Business Report October 29, 2021 In September 2021, the World Bank announced it was discontinuing its annual Doing Business Report (DBR) after nearly two decades of publication. The DBR attempts to quantitatively measure the ease of doing business in countries around the world, focusing on business regulations and property rights protections. The World Bank canceled the report because an independent investigation found that senior World Bank officials improperly influenced results in previous iterations of report, including to improve China's ranking. Governments and investors take these DBR rankings seriously, and the report has been credited with driving pro- growth reforms in developing countries. The report also has been controversial even before the most recent investigations, with critics arguing, among other things, that the report penalizes countries for adopting labor and safety protections. The circumstances surrounding the cancellation of the DBR raise a number of issues for Congress, including the value of the DBR as a resource, the research independence of international organizations, leadership roles at the international financial institutions (IFIs), and China's changing role at the World Bank. Congress authorizes and appropriates U.S. funding to the IFIs, and exercises oversight over U.S. policy at the IFIs. Origin and Development of the Report The annual World Bank's DBR began in 2004. It has been a key report for countries and businesses in understanding the investment and business climate in key economies, until its termination in 2021. In the product, the Bank attempted to measure member countries' legal and regulatory environments for local firms and allow comparisons to be made across countries and over time. The origin of the report is a 2002 World Bank report that covered five topic areas: starting a business, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency, employing workers, and getting credit. At the time, economic researchers at the World Bank turned their attention to the costs of business regulations and found empirical evidence between regulatory burdens and economic outcomes, such as levels Figure I. Doing Business Report Coverage Areas OPENING A BUSINESS of investment, economic growth, and broader measures of development. The World Bank expanded the scope and coverage of the annual report in subsequent years. The report grew to incorporate additional topic areas, including indicators on the cost and quality of business regulation and on the quality of legal frameworks, with each area composed of a number of individual measures. The most recent report, released in 2020, captures 294 individual regulatory reforms. Figure 1 illustrates the many number of steps involved with opening a new business that the DBR seeks to measure. In 2020, the World Bank was collecting data on the efficiency of public procurement and was planning on introducing the Contracting with the Government indicator in the 2021 report. The number of countries in the report also expanded, from 133 countries in 2003 to 190 in 2020. Based on the quantitative data, the report annually ranked countries on the ease of doing business. The most recent U.S. ranking was 6, behind South Korea at 5. Impact of the Report The DB rankings have been widely used in a range of settings. Politicians in developing countries have cited the World Bank's rankings in their political campaigns, and the report was frequently mentioned in major international newspapers such as the New York Times and the Financial Times. The ratings were a component of other indexes, including the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index and the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, among others. According to Google Scholar, the phrase Doing Business Report is included in more than 10,000 academic articles. By simplifying a complex group of regulatory policies into a single metric, which was heavily marketed and promoted, the Bank created competitive pressure among countries to introduce policies to improve their rankings. For example, the World Bank noted in a 2008 series of case studies, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia declared in 2006, I want Saudi Arabia to be among the top ten countries in Doing Business in 2010. DEALING WITH DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS OPERA1NG~ IN A SECUPE BUSINES! ENVIRONMENT Starting a Employing Dealing with Getting Registering Getting Protecting Paying Trading Enforcing Resoling business workers construction electricity property credit minority taxes across contracts insolvency permits investors borders Source: World Bank, 2020 Doing Business Report. ittps://crsreports.congress.gov

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