12 Years of Doing Business and countingDominik Wanner

12 Years of Doing Business and countingDominik Wanner

When the World Bank started to work on the first Doing Business Report

（DBR） back in 2003 they presumably did not expect that it will become of the most

influential， but also most controversial international business rankings in the world.

For the first time the legal systems of jurisdictions worldwide would be analysed and

such data later on statistically as well as mathematically processed to produce

worldwide doing business rankings. This was an ambitious project as part of the

relatively new discipline of Law and Economics. The results of DBR would make

economies and their legal system around the world comparable. And this would put

the World Bank also into the position to push for economic and business legal reforms

in countries or economies that would underperform. It became an important tool of

the World Bank. Therefore it is very important to have a close eye on DBR and its

development.

When DBR was published for the first time in 2004 it looked quite different from

DBR we can read in 2015. But the foundation for all that was laid about 15 years ago.

It started with only five different factors that have been analysed： Starting a

Business， Hiring and Firing Workers， Enforcing Contracts， Getting Credit， and

Closing a Business. Three of them survived until today， Starting a Business，

Enforcing Contracts， and Getting Credit. Hiring and Firing Workers became by far

the most controversial one. Labour Unions， academia， as well as governments

complaint about it as it was encouraging to have very flexible labour laws leaving

workers with not much protection. Therefore this DBR factor first got renamed into

Employing Workers， but then finally did not survive as an official DBR factor. But

the World Bank still evaluates it and keeps it as an unofficial annex factors in its

published statistics. It did not want to give it up as they set up the structure for the

necessary data collection and data processing. And they do not want to loose this tool

when it becomes necessary to suggest economic reform measures to various countries.

Closing a Business is still around as an official DBR factor， but it got redesigned as

is now called Resolving Insolvency. As the World Bank has been continuously

updating and redesigning the methodology of almost all DBR factors the collection

and processing of DBR data has been adapted and changed during the more than

twelve years of existence quite significantly.

Also new factors have been added over time. So already in the second edition

two more factors have been evaluated：Registering Property and Protecting Investors.

Adding factors involves a immense amount of work and preparation. Therefor adding

two of them is very remarkable and both of them still exist today. And again one year

later even three more factors have been added： Dealing with Licences， Paying

Taxes， and Trading across Boarders. And again one of them became politically

tremendously controversial. The evaluation of Paying Taxes preferred tax regimes that

have been very much favouring low tax burden for corporations. Therefore it was