The ease of doing business index ranks economies from 1 to 181. For each economy, the index is calculated as the ranking on the simple average of its percentile rankings on each of the 10 topics covered in Doing Business 2009. The ranking on each topic is the simple average of the percentile rankings on its component indicators. All topics are weighted equally. Learn more...

Starting a business
    • Procedures, time, cost and paid-in minimum capital to open a new business
Dealing with construction permits
    • Procedures, time and cost of obtaining construction permits, inspections and utility connections
Employing workers
    • Difficulty of hiring index, rigidity of hours index, difficulty and cost of economic redundancy dismissals
Registering property
    • Procedures, time and cost to register a transfer of commercial real estate
Getting credit
    • Strength of legal rights index, depth of credit information index
Protecting investors
    • Indices of the extent of disclosure, extent of director liability and ease of shareholder suits
Paying taxes
    • Number of tax payments, time to prepare and file tax returns and pay taxes, total taxes as a share of profit before all taxes borne
Trading across borders
    • Documents, time and cost to export and import
Enforcing contracts
    • Procedures, time and cost to resolve a commercial dispute in court
Closing a business
    • Recovery rate in bankruptcy

The Doing Business data are collected in a standardized way.

• To start, the Doing Business team, with academic advisers, designs a survey. The survey uses a standardized and basic business case to ensure comparability across countries and over time -- with assumptions about the legal form of the business, its size, its location and the nature of its operations.
• Surveys are administered through more than 6,700 local experts, including lawyers, business consultants, accountants, government officials and other professionals routinely administering or advising on legal and regulatory requirements.
• These experts have several (typically 4) rounds of interaction with the Doing Business team, involving conference calls, written correspondence and country visits. For Doing Business 2009 team members visited over 70 countries to verify data and expand the pool of local partners.
• The data from surveys are subjected to numerous tests for robustness, which lead to revisions or expansions of the information collected. The data for all sets of indicators in Doing Business 2009 are for June 1, 2008 (except for Paying taxes, for which the data refer to Jan-Dec 2007).

The indicators presented and analyzed in Doing Business measure business regulation and the protection of property rights -- and their effect on businesses, especially small and medium-size domestic firms.

First, the indicators document the degree of regulation, such as the number of procedures to start a business or to register and transfer commercial property.

Second, they gauge regulatory outcomes, such as the time and cost to enforce a contract, go through bankruptcy or trade across borders.

Third, they measure the extent of legal protections of property, for example, the protections of investors against looting by company directors or the range of assets that can be used as collateral according to secured transactions laws.

Fourth, they measure the flexibility of employment regulation.

Finally, a set of indicators documents the tax burden on businesses.
What are limitations of the Doing Business methodology?

The Doing Business methodology has 5 limitations that should be considered when interpreting the data.
First, the collected data refer to businesses in the country’s largest business city and may not be representative of regulation in other parts of the country. To address this limitation, subnational Doing Business indicators were created for 6 economies in 2007/08: China, Colombia, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and the Philippines. Six other subnational studies are under way: in Central Asia, Southeast Europe, Indonesia, Russia, Southeast Asia and Ukraine. Some existing studies are updated annually: for example, those in India, Mexico and Pakistan. These subnational studies point to significant differences in the speed of reform and the ease of doing business across cities in the same country.

Second, the data often focus on a specific business form -- a limited liability company (or its legal equivalent) of a specified size -- and may not be representative of the regulation on other businesses, for example, sole proprietorships.

Third, transactions described in a standardized case scenario refer to a specific set of issues and may not represent the full set of issues a business encounters.

Fourth, the measures of time involve an element of judgment by the expert respondents. When sources indicate different estimates, the time indicators reported in Doing Business represent the median values of several responses given under the assumptions of the standardized case.

Fifth, the methodology assumes that a business has full information on what is required and does not waste time when completing procedures. In practice, completing a procedure may take longer if the business lacks information or is unable to follow up promptly. Alternatively, the business may choose to disregard some burdensome procedures. For both reasons, the time delays reported in Doing Business 2009 would differ from the perceptions of entrepreneurs reported in the World Bank Enterprise Surveys or other perception surveys.

The ease of doing business index is limited in scope. Other areas important to business -- such as a country’s proximity to large markets, quality of infrastructure services (other than services related to trading across borders), the security of property from theft and looting, the transparency of government procurement, macroeconomic conditions or the underlying strength of institutions -- are not studied directly by Doing Business. To make the data comparable across countries, the indicators refer to a specific type of business -- generally a limited liability company operating in the largest business city.

The Doing Business research is conducted in cooperation with leading academic scholars. Each of the 10 indicators underlying Doing Business is based on an academic paper, and all these papers have been or are in the process of being published in peer-reviewed academic journals. As per the following table, these papers have been cited approximately 700 times in various academic works. Copies of the background papers may be downloaded for free at the Doing Business website: . These citations can be found by typing “Doing Business” and the names of the background papers or their authors (listed in the References section of the report) at Google Scholar. The list from a search done in June 2007 is also available. 

Topic and paper	Academic cites
1. Starting a business: “The Regulation of Entry,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE), 2002.	238
2. Dealing with construction permits: under development	-
3. Employing workers: “The Regulation of Labor,” QJE, 2004.	112
4. Registering property: under development	-
5. Getting credit: “Private credit in 129 countries,” Journal of Financial Economics, 2007.	58
6. Protecting investors: “The Law and Economics of Self-Dealing,” Journal of Financial Economics, 2008.	31
7. Paying taxes: “Taxes and entrepreneurship,” June 2007	-
8. Trading across borders: “Trading on Time,” Review of Economics and Statistics, conditional acceptance, June 2007.	7
9. Enforcing contracts: “Courts,” QJE, 2003.	128
10. Closing a business: “Debt Enforcement Around the World,” NBER Working Paper 12807, December 2006.	-
11. “New Comparative Economics,” Journal of Comparative Economics, December 2003.	102
12. “Regulation and growth,” Economics Letters, September 2006	19

Each indicator set studies a different aspect of the business environment. Country rankings vary, sometimes significantly, across indicator sets. For example, Moldova ranks 17th on the ease of enforcing contracts, its highest ranking, and 158th on the ease of dealing with construction permits, its lowest. These point to priorities for reform: Licensing regulation and administration of construction permits is one place to start in further improving business conditions in Moldova.

Across all 181 economies the average correlation coefficient between the 10 sets of indicators is 0.35, and the coefficients between any 2 sets of indicators range from 0.14 (between employing workers and registering property) to 0.57 (between protecting investors and getting credit). The low correlations suggest that countries rarely score universally well or universally badly on the indicators.

A high ranking on the aggregate ease of doing business means that the government has created a regulatory environment conducive to operating a business. Improvements on the Doing Business indicators are often a proxy for broader reforms to laws and institutions -- whose effects go beyond the administrative procedures and the time and cost to comply with business regulations.

On average, high rankings on the Doing Business indicators are associated with better economic and social outcomes, but this association need not be linear. For example, expedient court procedures to resolve commercial disputes are welcomed by businesses. But to ensure a fair process, some procedural requirements are necessary, and these may cause delays.

There remains a large unfinished agenda for research into what regulation constitutes binding constraints, what package of reforms is most effective, and how this is shaped by country context. Empirical research is also needed to establish the optimal level of business regulation -- for example, what the the optimal duration of court procedures is and what the optimal degree of social protection is. The Doing Business indicators provide a new empirical data set that may improve understanding of these issues.

Doing Business uses the World Bank regional and income group classifications, available here. Throughout the report the term rich economies refers to the high-income group, middle-income economies to the upper-middle-income group and poor economies to the lower-middle-income and low-income groups.

Questions on the methodology and challenges to data may be submitted to Doing Business via email.

Doing Business publishes 8,900 indicators each year. To create these indicators, the team measures more than 52,000 data points, each of which is made available on this website. Data time series for each indicator and economy are available on the website, beginning with the first year the indicator or economy was included in the report. To provide a comparable time series for research, the data set is back-calculated to adjust for changes in methodology and any revisions in data due to corrections. The website also makes available all original data sets used for background papers. The correction rate between Doing Business 2008 and Doing Business 2009 was 6%. It is hard to compare this with other international data sets because they do not publish corrections rates. In this respect Doing Business is the most transparent data set of its kind.

The Doing Business project is grateful for the generous contribution of more than 6,700 lawyers, accountants, freight forwarders, architects and public officials who serve as Local Partners in 181 economies. To become a local partner, email rru@worldbank.org today. Please include your name, contact information, expertise and the countries for which you would be willing to complete a questionnaire. A member of the Doing Business team will contact you shortly.

This year's report, Doing Business 2009, can be purchased from the World Bank publications Web site or on Amazon.com. Previous reports -- Doing Business, 2008, Doing Business in 2007: How to Reform, Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs, Doing Business in 2005: Removing Obstacles to Growth, and Doing Business in 2004: Understanding Regulation, are available for purchase in a hard-copy format from the World Bank's publications Web site.

The analysis in Doing Business has direct relevance for policy reform. It reveals the relationship between business regulation indicators and economic and social outcomes, allowing policymakers to see how particular laws and regulations are associated with poverty, corruption, employment, access to credit, the size of the informal economy, and the entry of new firms. Also, the analysis provides guidance on the design of reforms. The data offer a wealth of detail on the specific regulations and institutions that enhance or hinder business activity, the biggest bottlenecks causing bureaucratic delay, and the cost of complying with regulations. Governments can identify, after reviewing their country's Doing Business indicators, where they lag behind and what to reform.

What works in developed countries often works well in developing countries, too, defying the often-used saying, "one size doesn't fit all." But reform options are not always the same across rich and poor countries. In such instances, developing countries could simplify the models used in rich countries to make them workable with less capacity and fewer resources. Moreover, the good practice examples presented in the Doing Business report are not limited to rich countries or countries where comprehensive regulatory reform has taken place. The report provides many examples of successful reforms in developing countries in some areas of business regulation.

Policymakers, the aid community, investors, and researchers use Doing Business indicators and analysis to:

• compare countries on their regulatory environment for business,
• assess the impact of laws and regulations on business activity,
• make informed decisions regarding policy reform and private investment,
• identify best practices in regulatory reform, and
• support research on institutions and regulation.