Poor Will Suffer Most From World Bank Cancelling ‘Doing Business’ Project

Oct. 4, Robert Lawson, who directs the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at the Cox School of Business, SMU Dallas, for a piece critical of the World Bank decision to cancel the Doing Business project. Published in InsideSources under the heading Poor Will Suffer Most From World Bank Cancelling ‘Doing Business’ Project: https://bit.ly/3uKAItL

The World Bank recently announced the cancellation of the Doing Business project, one of its flagship research projects, because of accusations of corruption on the part of senior officials.

For the last 16 years, the Doing Business project has been measuring how governments around the world make it incredibly hard to run a business by not enforcing contracts efficiently and fairly, by requiring ridiculous amounts of paperwork to start a business, by imposing costly burdens on employers and employees in labor markets, and much more.

Doing Business was inspired by the pathbreaking work of the Peruvian economist, Hernando De Soto, who demonstrated in the 1980s how weakly defined property rights and onerous regulations in Peru pushed large numbers of farmers and small entrepreneurs to the informal sector where they lacked access to the legal system and capital markets.

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