Business Ready 2024

Between 2004 and 2020, the World Bank produced the excellent Doing Business reports—an annual survey of the ease of doing business in more than 100 countries.  Doing Business generated lots of media buzz, but the series was stopped due to concerns about its methodologies and the fact that many countries were gaming the project’s metrics to perform better on various rankings.

As a result, the World Bank team went back to the lab and have now begun releasing the next generation of these assessments:  Business Ready. The first report release is very promising and worth the wait.  Business Ready 2024 assesses fifty economies, not yet including the US or members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), using 2,000 different data points in areas like openness to trade and investment, legal frameworks, public services, and many more.  For data geeks, the report includes extensive details on methodologies and even contains a “reproducibility package” to further test the data and assumptions.

The first releases are heavily focused on data and methodology, but some key findings do stand out.  When looking at business regulations, only 2/3 of assessed countries can be deemed “business ready,” and public service gaps are a major challenge in half of them.  Follow-on reports will be arriving in 2025 and 2026.  Watch this space for more details!