Doing Business Under Fire

Dalibor Rohac Since its inception, World Bank’s Doing Business project has attracted a lot of criticism from groups that do not share its broadly pro-market policy ramifications. It is dispiriting to see the review panel of the project, appointed by the Bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, cave to the attacks and regurgitate the ideologically motivated myths spread by the project’s most vocal critics. The report by the review panel, which was released on Monday, and which will inform the decision about the future of the project, recommends stripping the publication of important parts of its content and weakening its role as a focal point for governments that are striving to improve business environments in their countries. That is a grave mistake. 1. Scrapping the rankings The report recommends that the aggregate rankings of countries should be dropped: The act of ranking countries may appear devoid of value judgment, but it is, in reality an arbitrary method of summarising vast amounts of complex information as a single number. (p. 20) It is true that aggregation is always contestable and that there is no objective way of weighing the ten Doing Business indicators to create the final index. But that is true of any aggregate measurement exercise in the social sciences. As long as the weights used in creating the ranking are transparent and the underlying data are known, no information is lost in producing the ordinal rankings of countries. If o...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs