Doing Business v. Business Ready: A Preliminary Comparison

ABSTRACT The World Bank's Doing Business (DB) project had measured the regulatory burden facing private businesses around the world since 2004. After the cancellation of the DB project in 2021, the World Bank announced that they would be creating a new project called Business Ready (B‐READY) to replace the DB project. The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast the two sets of data. Our preliminary conclusion is that while B‐READY is likely to be a valuable dataset, it is not going to be a seamless replacement for DB.