World Bank suspends ‘Doing Business’ rankings over fraud allegations. The World Bank Group has just announced the suspension of its highly acclaimed Doing Business (DB) report, which assesses the business climate in nearly 200 countries worldwide.
This decision, according to the World Bank, was driven by irregularities in data collected for the annual ranking of 2018 and 2020 respectively.
The latest report, published last year, ranked Nigeria, and Togo among the 10 countries that had shown the most improvement and collectively accounted for “one-fifth of all the reforms recorded worldwide.”
The report also ranked two Sub-Saharan economies, Mauritius and Rwanda, among the top 50 countries.
Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, and Togo ranked among the top 100 while South Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia ranked among the lowest globally.
The World Bank Group issued the following statement on the Doing Business Report:
Over the 17 years of its existence, the Doing Business report has been a valued tool for countries seeking to measure costs of doing business. Doing Business indicators and methodology are designed with no single country in mind, but rather to help to improve the overall business climate.
A number of irregularities have been reported regarding changes to the data in the Doing Business 2018 and Doing Business 2020 reports, published in October 2017 and 2019. The changes in the data were inconsistent with the Doing Business methodology.
The integrity and impartiality of our data and analysis is paramount and so we are immediately taking the following actions:
· We are conducting a systematic review and assessment of data changes that occurred subsequent to the institutional data review process for the last five Doing Business reports.
· We have asked the World Bank Group’s independent Internal Audit function to perform an audit of the processes for data collection and review for Doing Business and the controls to safeguard data integrity.
We will act based on the findings and will retrospectively correct the data of countries that were most affected by the irregularities.
The Wall Street Journal reported that data on China, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia appeared to have been inappropriately altered. If confirmed, the revised data could affect the rankings of the countries.
Source: https://africa.businessinsider.com/
