The Doing Business Project (www.doingbusiness.org), from the World
Bank and the International Finance Corporation (http://www1.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/corp_ext_content/ifc_external_corporate_site/about+ifc),
focuses on business regulation and enforcement in countries around the world.
By analyzing regulation applied to small and medium-sized companies throughout
their life cycle, the project has developed objective measures of regulation
and annually publishes comparative data across countries and across time.
Through its publications, Doing Business aims to encourage countries to move
towards more efficient regulation; it offers measurable benchmarks for reform;
and it serves as a resource for researchers and others interested in the
business climate of each country.
A clear and uncluttered homepage invites you to
"Explore Economy Data" in two ways. First, you can select an economy,
which generally means a country. They are all there, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Alternatively, select a
topic:
Starting a Business
Dealing with Construction Permits
Getting Electricity
Registering Property
Getting Credit
Protecting Investors
Paying Taxes
Trading Across Borders
Enforcing Contracts
Resolving Insolvency
Employing Workers
The topics are all areas that represent areas of regulation
in most countries and constitute the factors (except for Employing Workers) on
which each economy is ranked in the annual reports. Since 2003, Doing Business
has published a report each year that compares all economies on these factors
and computes an "Ease of Doing Business" index. Doing Business 2013: Smarter Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises,
was featured as I researched this site in early January and placed Singapore
at the top of the ranking as the economy in which it is easiest to do business--for
the seventh straight year. Poland
was named as the "most improved."
Exploring the Singapore
Economy
I selected Singapore
from the dropdown list of economies and immediately the "Ease of Doing
Business in Singapore"
page (www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/singapore)
appeared. Singapore
is identified by Region (East Asia & Pacific), Income Category (high),
Population (5,183,700), and GNI per Capita in US$ (42,930). Then the page notes
the Doing Business 2013 rank (1), the 2012 rank (1), and the change (0).
Following is a Topic Ranking grid, listing the ten individual topics on which
the economy is ranked, with current and prior year rankings, and the change. Singapore
was ranked no. 1 in Trading Across Borders this year and last, but that was the
only no. 1 ranking it received. It falls to no. 12 for Getting Credit and
Enforcing Contracts, and down to 36 (its lowest ranking) for Registering
Property.
The bottom part of the page provides a changeable display of
each of the ten topics. The default is Starting a Business. You can start a
business in Singapore in a
single day for less than 400 Singapore
dollars; a three-step procedure is outlined. But there is more. Business
start-up is ranked against the other Doing Business economies, the regional
standard, and an OECD standard in the areas of Procedures (number), Time
(days), Cost (% of income per capita), and Paid-in Min. Capital (% of income
per capita). If you don't understand what these concepts mean, you can hover
over the term and a brief explanation will pop up, with a link to the
methodology. Further links to details on starting a business, the methodology that
Doing Business uses for this computation,
and a page comparing all economies on this factor are provided.
Move to the other nine topics by clicking on that factor in
the Topic Rankings grid or on the tab at the top of the topic part of the page.
I examined Registering Property and came away with a better understanding of
why Singapore
ranked lower on that topic.
Exploring Topics
Any of the topics can be explored in detail by selecting the
topic from the drop-down Explore Economy Data menu in the upper right of each
page. On the Starting a Business page, the main data is a statistical chart
with all the state economies on the left axis, and the factors related to
starting a business that we saw previously across the top. In addition to the
national economies, there are regional aggregations. Any of the columns can be
sorted by clicking on the heading, so it is possible to easily determine that New Zealand
ranks first in the category of starting a business.
Here, as on the economies pages, there is a row of tabs.
Whereas the tabs in the economies pages lead to alternative topics, the tabs in
the topics pages lead to more
information explaining and supporting the mission and methodology of Doing
Business. From the default Data view, you can switch to Distance to Frontier,
What is Measured, Why it Matters, DB Reforms, Good Practices, Transparency,
FAQ, and Other Resources. Reading
through these pages provides an accessible tutorial in international business
and finance, together with some interesting case histories. For example, Isaac
Merritt Singer formed the I.M. Singer & Company partnership with Edward C.
Clark in 1851. Clark, however, persuaded
Singer to change the form of business to a limited liability corporation in
1863 to protect it from court battles with Singer's heirs--Singer reportedly
had more than 20 children!
In the Data view, a Subnational icon appears with various
economies; clicking on the Subnational icon for India opens up a new page (http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploretopics/starting-a-business/india/)
with a similar chart, but detailed for 17 Indian states or union territories. There
are subnational pages for the following economies:
China
Columbia
Egypt,
Arab. Rep.
India
Indonesia
Italy
Kenya
Mexico
Morocco
Algeria
Pakistan
Philippines
Russian
Federation
Full Text Options
There is a lot of data at Doing Business. Much of it can be
purchased in print form, but the World Bank's Open Data project (http://data.worldbank.org/) makes
most of it available via free download. Click on the Reports tab in the
navigation bar below the dark blue on the homepage to find the annual global Doing Business reports. All--back to 2004--can
be downloaded for free. Then click on the shaded blue tabs below the top bar to
find regional, subnational, and thematic reports, and case studies. Many of the
regional and subnational reports are actually pieces of the global reports, but
accessing them this way makes it easier to zero in on specific area and also
provides bibliographic data indicating the date and original publication.
All the data pages for topics and economies provide print
and Excel download options. You can open a read-only copy of the Excel file
quickly, or you can choose to save a copy to disk, which then can be
manipulated in all the usual Excel ways. It took me practically no time to
download, save, and open the file of the Trading Across Borders topical data. For
the economy pages, you can refine your output options so you only print or
download one or more of the topical pages or an economy summary.
More Discovery
Although the browse methods of discovery are well thought
out and work well, there is also a Search Text box at the upper right of each
page. Keywords entered appear to be searched as strings with automatic
stemming, so entrepreneur finds entrepreneurs,
entrepreneurship, and so on.
Oddly, Advanced Search (http://extsearch.worldbank.org/servlet/SiteSearchServlet?adv=true&qUrl=doingbusiness&ed=rrudb)
seems to be accessible only from this rather convoluted URL, or from a link at
the bottom of the quick Search Text box results; keyword entries from the prior
quick search are not carried through. Using Advanced Search you can limit by
language: Chinese (Simplified), English, Estonian, French, Japanese,
Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, or Spanish. The search engine supports all
words, any words, or exact phrase searching. You can also specify occurrences
of search term(s) to be anywhere on the page, in the title, or in the page URL,
and limit to pages that have been updated in the past 3, 6, or 12 months, or anytime. A
format limiter permits searching for one specified format: Adobe Acrobat or
Postscript files, Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint formats, Rich Text
Format, or any format. Finally, you can change the length of your results pages
to include 10 or 20 results.
Doing Business is a superb site, both for the amount of data
it contains and makes available for free, and for its numerous means of
displaying and explaining the data. Information from the Doing Business project
can make you more knowledgeable about doing business abroad, and in time, its
advocacy efforts may even make doing business abroad easier.
Susanne Bjørner
provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers.
Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.
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