The World Bank seems to be going through its very own Groundhog Day with the announcement of the Business Enabling Environment (BEE) Project. Even a cursory look reveals that it is little more than a rebranding of the (rotten) apple of its eye: the Doing Business (DB) report and rankings, which was discontinued last year.
The BEE appeared just weeks before the Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) published a report questioning the development effectiveness of DB and recommending “to avoid using business regulatory or similar global indicators as explicit reform objectives”. Yet the bank marches on regardless, apparently ready to repeat the same mistakes.
The DB Report was certainly highly influential: it was one of the World Bank Group’s most widely read publications and its content steered policy decisions worldwide. But it was also one of the Bank’s most controversial projects, criticised for its methodology,…
