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?

PS. And why not launch a Doing Bureaucracy Efficiently Review? Billions of citizens around the world would appreciate it

The Iraq Study Group Report’s as close at it gets silver bullet

The Iraq Study Group Report’s perhaps most important yet least discussed recommendation is “redistributing a portion of oil revenues directly to the population on a per capita basis” as it has “the potential to give all Iraqi citizens a stake in the nation’s chief natural resource” which could only foster a national identity and help stimulate the search for normality. Besides, given that the price of gas in Iraq is so low that you can fill your tank with less than two dollars, which of course is the source of much corruption, the sharing in the additional revenues that a price increase of gas would generate provides the political support for such difficult but necessary action.

We were told not to expect any silver bullet from the Report but in my opinion this revenue sharing program is a close to one as it gets. Implementing such a program in a transparent way, with the help of the World Bank, could also have far-reaching consequences for fighting all the other oil curses around the world.

What does recommendation number 28 really mean?

The Iraq Study Group Report suggests in recommendation number 2 to “Support the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq” which makes it somewhat difficult to understand the real meaning of number 28 when it says “Oil revenues should accrue to the central government and be shared on the basis of population”, since how do you share if there is only one central government? Now, if what they actually propose is that the oil income should be shared by the population directly on a per capita basis, this would indeed be a much welcomed proposition, given that we all know how impossible it is to construe a real democracy when oil revenues go directly to central government coffers and with it makes a mockery of any balance of power in the society. In the chaotic Iraq trusting the Iraqi people with their oil revenues is wiser than trusting any central government with it.