Measuring and analyzing country change in establishing ease of doing business using a revised version of World Bank's ease of doing business index

The World Bank's Ease of Doing Business (EDB) index is well-known and widely used to quantify and monitor the 'ease of doing business' within a country. The index attracted notable criticism for being too reliant on a 'one size fits all' approach (equal weighting) to the weighting step of its construction. The present paper recomputes the EDB index by employing a more flexible 'Benefit-of-Doubt' weighting method. Using different versions of this method, changes in EDB are examined for the period 2010-2019, whilst grouping countries according to regional classifications as defined by the World Bank. In addition, year-by-year trends in the EDB index are explored. The results show considerable differences in changes in the EDB index both between and within different regions. Within some regions there were also signs of clustering in terms of similar rates of improvement or deterioration over time. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.