World Bank, don't silence your Doing Business report
Long time ago, briefly, two years, I was an Executive Director at the World Bank.
Nowadays, I do not speak for anyone except, hopefully my grandchildren.
That said and though I hold a serious reservation about something that the Ease of Doing Business ignores, this is what I now would opine about the report "Investigation of Data Irregularities in Doing Business 2018, 2020"
It’s very hard to have the cake and eat it too.
The amount of successful and unsuccessful pressure exercised for tampering the data in the World Bank’s Doing Business Review, clearly evidences its great importance. Between perfection and relevance what's more important?
In other words: World Bank, if even China exerts so much pressure to improve its ratings, you must know that with the Doing Business report you have something extremely valuable in your hands. World Bank, just because someone mishandled it, and it's not picture perfect, please don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
If the World Bank is not the most appropriate entity to carry out world wide ease of doing business research, who is? Or is such research not needed? I assure you that, even with all its possible mistakes, we citizens in all countries striving to objectively improve our rankings in Doing Business, we sure need it.
PS. We read in the report: "If incorporating Hong Kong SAR's data into China's data, China's ranking in Doing Business 2018, would rise to 70, eight spots higher than the previous year... (fifteen places higher than the originally calculated ranking of 85)". If that's not an extremely important contribution for the understanding of the Ease of Doing Business worldwide, what is?
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