Economies do better at enacting regulations to improve the national business climate than they do in providing the public services needed to secure actual progress, according to the World Bank Group’s new Business Ready report.

The inaugural 2024 report, which assesses the business climate in 50 economies, provides an extensive dataset – 1200 indicators per economy – to identify specific areas where there is room for improvement and motivate reforms. Coverage will increase over the next three years to reach about 180 economies in 2026, providing a full global benchmark.

Nearly all 50 economies assessed this year perform better on their regulatory framework than they do on the public services they provide to ease compliance by businesses. Such implementation gaps keep businesses, workers, and society as a whole from reaping the full benefits of a healthy business climate.

On a scale of 0 to 100, economies score an average of 65.5 for the quality of their regulatory framework—meaning, on average, economies are nearly two-thirds of the way to being business-ready in this category. But they score just 49.7 for their public services, indicating they are only half as ready as they ought to be. This gap exists across all income levels and all regions, although it’s smallest in high-income economies and greatest in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and Northern Africa.

“With economic growth being slowed by demography, debt, and discord, progress will come only through the ingenuity of private enterprise,” said Indermit Gill, the World Bank Group’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics.

“That depends on conducive conditions—an investment climate that facilitates the economic miracles that entrepreneurs make when they are given half a chance, miracles that are badly needed today.Business Ready gives governments the intelligence they need to create conditions that allow businesses to build prosperity for their shareholders, consumers and workers while treading lightly on the planet", he added.

Business Ready, the successor of the Doing Business project, reflects a more balanced and transparent approach toward evaluating a country’s business and investment climate. This approach has been shaped by recommendations from experts from within and outside the World Bank Group, including governments, the private sector, civil society organisations, and academic researchers.

Across the world, the private sector is a powerful force for economic growth—but it needs the right environment to thrive. Business Ready assesses not only the regulatory burden that firms face in the course of entering the market, innovating, and expanding their operations—how long it takes to start a business, for example—but also the quality of regulations.

Do labour regulations, for example, include requirements for workplace safety? Do start-up regulations require that the identity of entrepreneurs be verified? Beyond accounting for business regulations, Business Ready evaluates the public services needed to implement them. Do governments make it easy for businesses to pay taxes by setting up online and interconnected facilities? Do they provide public databases that support transparency and make it easy for good businesses to obtain credit?

Business Ready also measures the actual conditions that businesses face in practice. These conditions vary greatly among the 50 economies assessed this year. It takes anywhere from three days to 80 days for a domestic firm to be registered—and up to 106 days for a foreign firm.

Firms face an average of four electrical outages per month, although the number can be as high as 22. On average, it takes slightly more than two years for a business dispute to be resolved in court, although the duration can be as long as 5 years or as little as 105 days.

Comparable data of this breadth and quality allows businesses to make key decisions on how and where to operate. It enables governments to better calibrate the exact policy settings needed for the type of private sector development that enables businesses, workers, and society to thrive.

“Richer economies do tend to be more business-ready, but economies need not be rich to have a good business environment,” said Norman Loayza, Director of the World Bank’s Indicators Group, which leads the Business Ready project.

“Our analysis finds that low- and middle-income economies can also achieve a strong business-enabling climate. Rwanda, Georgia, Colombia, Vietnam, and Nepal, for example, do well in various areas such as the quality of regulations, strength of public services, and overall efficiency of the system.”  

Transparency is a key feature of Business Ready’s safeguards for data integrity.