Thankfully this week the team leading one of the projects I worked on at the World Bank was able to publish it’s annual rankings of business laws and regulations for nearly 190 countries (www.doingbusiness.org).
The rankings tend to be a barometer of red tape, corruption and small business vigor and guide policymakers in their efforts to promote healthy entrepreneurship.
The Chinese government (ranked 96th in the world) has waged a campaign to neuter the project by shutting down the rankings for several years now – taking over from an angry campaign for many years before that by the French (ranked 38th). (Two "expert" panels have "investigated" the methodology over the past 10 years - the first, mostly economists, had a positive verdict; the second, by all accounts a mixed chaotic bag, largely negative.)
So the Doing Business rankings get to live for another year at least. In this context I noted with interest news reports that the Chinese government will start to combat chronic urban pollution by doing performance rankings:
“China will start to point the finger at its top ten most air-polluted cities — each and every month — in the hopes that national humiliation will push positive environmental action. A parallel list of the nation’s ten cities with best air qualities will also be published.”
Often what you hear in the World Bank boardroom is out of sync with what countries actually do (foreign policy may rule at the board, not economics) . But let’s hope that this internal Chinese embrace of benchmarking will spillover to the Doing Business Project.
