About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

1 1 (March 7, 2023)

handle is hein.crs/govekux0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional Research Service gam Informring th legislative cI ba e sinceo 1914 The World Bank's Doing Business Report In September 2021, the World Bank announced it was discontinuing its annual Doing Business Report (DBR) after nearly two decades of publication. The DBR attempted 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 after an independent investigation found that senior World Bank officials improperly influenced results in previous iterations of report, including to improve China's ranking. Proponents credited the DBR with driving pro-growth reforms in developing countries, but skeptics criticized it for penalizing countries for adopting labor and safety protections. The World Bank is in the process of developing a new approach to assess the business and investment climate in countries. The circumstances surrounding the cancellation of the DBR and the planning its revival in a new format raise a number of issues for Congress, including the value of the DBR and its successor, the research independence of international organizations, and China's role at the World Bank. Congress authorizes and appropriates U.S. funding to the World Bank and other international finance institutions (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 had been a critical 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 of investment, economic growth, and broader measures of development. The World Bank expanded the scope and coverage of the annual report in su bsequent years. The report grew to incorporate additional topic areas, including indicators on the cost and quality of business regulation and on the Updated March 7, 2023 quality of legal frameworks, with each area composed of a number of individual measures. The most recent report, released in 2020, captured 294 individual regulatory reforms. Figure 1 illustrates the multiple steps involved with opening a new business that the DBR sought to measure. The number of countries in the report 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 DBR rankings were widely cited and influential. Politicians in developing countries cited the World Bank's rankings in their political campaigns, and major international newspapers regularly reported on the DBR. 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. 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, 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. Many policymakers and analysts credit the DBR in contributing to the dramatic decrease in the cost of starting a business in developing countries over the past 15 years (As the report gained prominence, criticisms also emerged. Critics argued that the report ignored the social benefits of regulation and encouraged countries to engage in a regulatory race-to-the-bottom. The World Bank reformed the DBR over the years to address some of these concerns. For example, pressure from some Members of Congress and the International Labor Organization led to the suspension of the DBR's Employing Workers indicator, which awarded the best scores to countries that had the least amount of regulation in areas such as minimum wage levels and maximum work hours per week. Figure 2).

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most