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The Washington-based World Bank hopes the new ratings will ofer ‘a common
language for deciding where they’re going and how they get there’. Photograph:
Bloomberg/Getty Images
View image in fullscreen
The Washington-based World Bank hopes the new ratings will ofer ‘a common
language for deciding where they’re going and how they get there’. Photograph:
Bloomberg/Getty Images
World Bank

This article is more than 1 year old


NEW WORLD BANK BUSINESS RATINGS WILL EXAMINE COUNTRIES’ WORKER RIGHTS

This article is more than 1 year old

Business Ready pilot edition to debut in 2024, replacing Doing Business ratings
that were found to be influenced by political pressure

Ramon Antonio Vargas
Thu 8 Jun 2023 01.24 AESTFirst published on Wed 7 Jun 2023 18.00 AEST
Share




New methods and safeguards for assessing the business and investment climate in
as many as 180 countries could give governments and citizens around the world “a
common language for deciding where they’re going and how they get there”,
according to spokespeople for the recently unveiled project.

World Bank staff were told to give special treatment to son of Trump official
Read more


The World Bank announced last month that it was preparing to implement new
Business Ready rankings after eliminating the predecessor Doing Business ratings
in September 2021, citing internal reviews as well as an outside investigation
which found senior leaders at the organization had exerted pressure on
subordinates to manipulate data to favor China.

Other nations whose rankings were similarly boosted included Saudi Arabia,
Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates. And the Guardian reported in April that
World Bank staff were instructed to afford preferential treatment to the son of
a high-ranking Donald Trump White House official after the US treasury backed a
$13bn (£10bn) hike in funding for the United Nations-affiliated organization.



Set to debut in the spring of 2024, Business Ready’s pilot edition aims to cover
an initial group of 54 economies in Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East
and sub-Saharan Africa, according to the bank. The bank plans to add more
countries as it refines its methodologies, which for the first time call for
examining a country’s records pertaining to workers’ rights, as defined by the
International Labor Organization.

Assessments of women’s and gender rights as well as examinations of culture in
general are also being implemented as the World Bank eventually hopes to be able
to rank economies on the local and regional level, said Kasey Henderson, whose
Washington DC-based Global Situation Room firm is working with the bank on
Business Ready’s messaging.

“This really is the World Bank’s flagship economic benchmarking exercise and one
that I think they really want to be kind of a marker … along a path towards
prosperity at a society level, encompassing more than just the business
environment,” Henderson added recently. “That piece helps give really unique
insights and information for countries as they continue working to grow their
economies … and attract and retain business.”

World Bank experts, governments, private sector members and civil society groups
helped shape Business Ready’s new criteria, whose overarching goal is to create
a dataset whose integrity is beyond reproach while also bringing complex
economic issues around the world to a broader audience. Officials at the
organization had not yet decided whether it would rank countries’ business
climates or simply put out an overall index, though they expected to resolve
that before the first of the new reports.



Whatever the case, the World Bank anticipated that other areas assessed by
Business Ready would include worker safety, environmental sustainability and
market competition, rather than just viewing everything from what Norman Loayza
– the director of the bank’s Indicators Group – called “the perspective of the
private entrepreneur”.

Center for Global Development fellow Justin Sandefur cautioned Wednesday on
Twitter that the World Bank has previously made similar promises “about rigorous
measurement and transparency, not rankings and chasing news headlines”. But,
Sandefur added, “it ended in scandal last time”.

For his part, the Global Situation Room’s Brett Bruen added that Business Ready
could ultimately produce “a common language for [countries’] deciding where
they’re going and how they get there”.

“The notion is that every country in the world is at various stages of
readiness, and these reports – which are exhaustively researched and put
together – would show how that readiness lines up to opportunities and their own
goals.”

Reuters contributed reporting

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