Ease of Doing Business around the World

 Doing Business around the world

Produced by the World Bank and the IFC Doing Business provides a quantitative measure of regulations for starting a business, dealing with  construction permits, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying  taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business—as they apply to domestic  small and medium-size enterprises.

 It provides objective measures of business regulations and their  enforcement across 181 economies and selected cities at the sub-national and regional level. It does  not, for  example, measure security, macroeconomic stability, corruption, the labour skills of the  population, the underlying strength of institutions or the quality of infrastructure.

Economies are ranked on their ease of doing business, from 1 – 181, with first place being the best.  A high ranking on the ease of doing business index means the regulatory environment is  conducive to  the operation of business. This index averages the country's percentile rankings  on 10 topics, made up  of a variety of indicators, giving equal weight to each topic. The rankings  are from the Doing Business  2009 report, covering the period April 2007 to June 2008.

This service is free on the web and students, staff and faculty of the London Business School should supplement this data with further risk, operational, industry data and forecasts from Global Insight and Business Monitor Online.

Picture: Creative Commons: Flickr:Mindluge