Fun with numbers

By PDS | 13 September 2005

The International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank produces an annual Doing business ranking benchmarking business regulations. They have a database which:

provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement. The Doing Business indicators are comparable across 155 economies. They indicate the regulatory costs of business and can be used to analyze specific regulations that enhance or constrain investment, productivity and growth.

All very well and a worthy endeavour, but not as much fun as the ability to make your own index rankings by sorting the data by your own criteria - compare how easy is it to pay taxes in Belarus or trade across borders in Denmark by rank.

The serious point is that the more heavily over-regulated countries tend to be poorer. See for yourself and manipulate the database here.