The DoingBusiness project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 185 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level.

The Doing Business Project, launched in 2002, looks at domestic small and medium-size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle.

By gathering and analyzing comprehensive quantitative data to compare business regulation environments across economies and over time, Doing Business encourages countries to compete towards more efficient regulation; offers measurable benchmarks for reform; and serves as a resource for academics, journalists, private sector researchers and others interested in the business climate of each country.

In addition, Doing Business offers detailed subnational reports, which exhaustively cover business regulation and reform in different cities and regions within a nation. These reports provide data on the ease of doing business, rank each location, and recommend reforms to improve performance in each of the indicator areas. Selected cities can compare their business regulations with other cities in the country or region and with the 185 economies that Doing Business has ranked.

The first Doing Business report, published in 2003, covered 5 indicator sets and 133 economies. This year’s report covers 11 indicator sets and 185 economies. The project has benefited from feedback from governments, academics, practitioners and reviewers. The initial goal remains: to provide an objective basis for understanding and improving the regulatory environment for business around the world.

More information in www.doingbusiness.org