QoG Data

Ease of Doing Business - Historical Data

Data source: Ease of Doing Business Report

The Doing Business project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies. This EOB 2020 report covers 11 indicator sets and 190 economies. Most indicator sets refer to a case scenario in the largest business city of each economy, except for 11 economies that have a population of more than 100 million as of 2013 (Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Russian Federation and the United States) where Doing Business, also collected data for the second largest business city.

The ease of doing business score captures the gap between an economy's performance and a measure of best practice across the entire sample of 41 indicators for 10 Doing Business topics (the labor market regulation indicators are excluded). For starting a business, for example, New Zealand and Georgia have the lowest number of procedures required (1). New Zealand also holds the shortest time to start a business (0.5 days), while Slovenia has the lowest cost (0.0).

Calculating the ease of doing business score for each economy involves two main steps. In the first step individual component indicators are normalized to a common unit where each of the 41 component indicators y (except for the total tax and contribution rate) is rescaled using the linear transformation (worst - y)/(worst - best). In this formulation, the highest score represents the best regulatory performance on the indicator across all economies since 2005 or the third year in which data for the indicator were collected.

Both the best regulatory performance and the worst regulatory performance are established every five years based on the Doing Business data for the year in which they are established and remain at that level for the five years regardless of any changes in data in interim years. Thus, an economy may establish the best regulatory performance for an indicator even though it may not have the highest score in a subsequent year. Conversely, an economy may score higher than the best regulatory performance if the economy reforms after the best regulatory performance is set. For example, the best regulatory performance for the time to get electricity is set at 18 days. In the Republic of Korea it now takes 13 days to get electricity while in the United Arab Emirates it takes just 10 days. Although the two economies have different times, both economies score 100 on the time to get electricity because they have exceeded the threshold of 18 days.

For scores such as those on the strength of legal rights index or the quality of land administration index, the best regulatory performance is set at the highest possible value (although no economy has yet reached that value in the case of the latter).

Due to the changes in methodologies, some variables are presented separately, given that they are not comparable given these said changes.

Dataset type

Time-Series

Dataset level

Country

Citation

When using this dataset, please cite as:

• The World Bank Group. (2020). Doing business data 2020. http://www.doingbusiness.org/en/data

@misc{eob1,
 author = {{The World Bank Group}},
 last_updated = {2024-04-03},
 note = {Accessed on 24-09-2020},
 title = {Doing Business Data 2020},
 url = {http://www.doingbusiness.org/en/data},
 year = {2020}
}

Variables in this dataset

Browse variables and select them for download.

Building quality control index (0-15)(DB16-20 methodology)

QoG code: eob_bqci

The building Quality control index (0-15) (DB16-20 methodology) index ranges from 0 to 15 and is calculated on the basis of the following six indices: (i) quality of building regulations, (ii) quality ...