The World Bank's Business Ready Project: The Labor Topic, ILO Standards and the Role and Impact of Labour Regulation

The World Bank's new Business Ready (B‐READY) project replaces the controversial Doing Business index in assessing global business and investment environments and is intended to galvanise legal reform in countries across the world. The project is driven by a set of indicators that measure and compare key facets of countries' business environments. B‐READY includes a ‘Labor Topic’ of considerable significance to future global policy on working life, legal regulation and economic development. This article presents a methodological and conceptual evaluation of the labour dimension of B‐READY to gauge the potential impacts on international and domestic labour law and development policy. Applying a legal‐comparative method, it compares the project's Labor indicators with International Labour Organization standards and trends in domestic laws, revealing significant divergence from these norms and a consequential endorsement of very poor‐quality jobs. We attribute these outcomes to the Bank's enduring deregulatory model and identify significant new and longstanding, dimensions of this model: a novel bifurcation of labour standards, reflected in B‐READY's scoring system; a continuing failure to recognise the range of laws that shape working life, notably those that can exacerbate or curb informality; and a reinforced yet deficient assessment of the de facto effects of labour laws.