The World Bank Group has begun work to assess the business and investment climate in up to 180 economies as part of its flagship Business Ready project, which is a key tool in the World Bank Group’s new strategy to facilitate private investment, generate employment, and improve productivity in order to help countries accelerate inclusive and sustainable development.
Business Ready builds on and supersedes the World Bank Group’s previous Doing Business programme, according to the organization, and reflects a more fair and open approach to evaluating a country’s business and investment climate.
According to the World Bank, the evaluated project was formed by advice from experts both within and outside the World Bank Group, including governments, the commercial sector, and civil society groups.
In the spring of 2024, the first annual Business Ready report, encompassing 54 economies, will be released.
The World Bank Group released two key documents today: the Business Ready Manual and Guide, which details the detailed protocols and safeguards in place to ensure the integrity of the assessments, and the Business Ready Methodology Handbook, which details the project’s indicators and scoring methodology.
Extensive talks with regulatory experts and nationally representative World Bank Enterprise Surveys, gathered by competitively chosen survey providers, are used to obtain data on the business environments of the initial 54 economies.
“The World Bank Group is bringing back a fuller and sharper measure of the investment climate of countries—something that is badly needed in a global economy in the midst of a generalized slowdown,” said Indermit Gill, the World Bank Group’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics.
“Governments that do more to make their economies business-ready will do better in reviving private investment, creating jobs, and quickening the transition to cleaner energy.” The World Bank Group has long been a leader in spurring business-regulatory reforms across the world.
Its assessments of the business-enabling environment worldwide helped spur nearly 4,000 regulatory reforms in developing and developed economies over the past two decades.
They also significantly advanced academic research in this area, resulting in 4,000 peer-reviewed research papers and at least 10,000 working papers. Countries, moreover, often use these assessments to shape their development strategies.
“The ‘Business Ready’ project represents a new approach to assessing the business and investment climates,” said Norman Loayza, Director of the World Bank’s Indicators Group, which leads the project.
“The ‘Business Ready’ approach aims to establish a better balance between the ease of conducting a business and the broader implications for society as a whole.
“It gives a more positive role for governments, advocating for better public services for businesses. In addition to experts’ assessments, it includes direct information from entrepreneurs and managers on their experience navigating the economy’s business environment.”
Business Ready focuses on ten topics that span a company’s lifecycle as it begins, operates, closes, or reorganizes its operations: Business Entry, Business Location, Utility Services, Labor, Financial Services, International Trade, Taxation, Dispute Resolution, Market Competition, and Business Insolvency. Over the next three years, the project will expand to cover approximately 180 economies worldwide on an annual basis, beginning with 54 economies in 2023-24, 120 economies in 2024-25, and 180 economies in 2025-26.
The project’s name reflects its goal: to prepare each country’s economic climate for a thriving private sector. The name emphasizes the idea that economies exist in various phases of preparedness and that governments play a critical role in building a business climate suitable to long-term development.
Transparency will be a key feature of Business Ready’s safeguards for data integrity. All information collected by the project—raw granular data, scores, as well as the calculations used to obtain the scores—will be made publicly available on the project website. Moreover, all results presented in the reports will be replicable using straightforward toolkits available on the website.
