The World Bank’s business-rankings mess

RUNNING A BUSINESS is hard in many parts of the world. So the World Bank gives governments an incentive to make it easier, and ranks them according to where the burden of regulation is lightest. This year, though, its Doing Business (DB) index has itself been ensnared in procedural problems. On August 27th the Bank said that publication of the next set of rankings would be delayed. It comes in a year when, The Economist understands, China was going to be ranked one of the biggest improvers. On that the Bank had no comment.

Some cheered the postponement because they think the index is counterproductive, specious, or both. Many critics worry that it encourages PR-attentive technocrats and politicians to slash regulations excessively and that it ignores how rules are applied in practice. A study in 2015 found “almost zero correlation” between the DB results and what businesses say when directly surveyed by the World Bank.