Doing Business Blog - The World Bank Group

The Birth of a Doing Business Report

November 14 was my due date: I'm supposed to deliver my first baby. It is a girl. Nothing has happened so far. Looking back over the past 9 months, I'm wondering about other events in life that take about the same time and go by (too) fast. A graduate program for example. Or the Doing Business report cycle.

Early January of each year, Doing Business sends out surveys, one for each of the 10 topics, to our 6,700 local experts in 181 economies around the world.

Local experts or 'respondents' as we call them, are asked to return the completed questionnaire 3 weeks later, towards early February. Some do it immediately, others need more encouragement. All 6,700 experts share their expertise for free, "pro bono", knowing their work- through the publication of the Doing Business reports, helps to inspire governments to reform business regulations and cut red-tape.

One Day in the Life of a Business

"One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" got Solzhenitsyn a Nobel Prize in literature. The book is dull: it describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s. However, it described a reality that few had imagined.

It would be useful to have a similar account of the life of an ordinary business in, say, Africa. Many efforts have gone into improving the environment for doing business in Africa. The Doing Business team now works in over 20 African countries. The Investment Climate Facility for Africa has even more ambitious plans.

A parallel effort exists. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo at MIT Economics have a 2006 Journal of Economic Prespectives paper on the economic lives of the poor. The authors document how the poor (those who have less than $1 a day) earn their income and how they spend it in 13, mostly African, countries.