China cooks the books

NEW DELHI: Either the case of Chile and Russia or the case of Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, we aren't short of stories where Ease of Doing Business data has been manipulated and misrepresented. The maximum irregularities that led to the misrepresentation of the data have been reported from China which followed the end of Ease of Doing Business Report.

EODB is a joint project of the DPIIT and the World Bank to improve the overall business climate in the United States. DPIIT is responsible for the promotion of industries and internal trade. These rankings show how easy it is to do business in the state, with increased government transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness vis-a-vis business enterprises.

According to the Doing Business Project, which began in 2002, the regulations that apply to small and medium-sized businesses are evaluated over the course of their entire life cycle. Researchers collected data on the effectiveness of business regulations in 190 different economies, selected cities at subnational and national levels, as part of the doing business project. Several inconsistencies have been discovered with regards to data changes in the doing business 2018 and doing business 2020 reports, which were released in October 2017 and April 2019, respectively.

A statement from the World Bank said the data changes were not in line with its business methodology. In addition, it stated that "we have asked the World Bank Group's independent Internal Audit function to conduct 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 retrospectively correct the data of countries that were most affected by the irregularities," it added. (IANS)

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