What's New?
Recent updates to World Bank Group financial and private sector development websites are highlighted below. Direct links to these sites are provided to the right.
- Doing Business in China 2008: This inaugural report evaluates the local business regulatory environment and monitors progress on reforms undertaken by subnational governments across China. Quantitative indicators on business regulations and their enforcement were created for China's 26 provincial capitals and 4 centrally administered municipalities. Comparisons with the national results (as measured in Shanghai) and the rest of the world are based on the indicators in global Doing Business 2008. Learn more...
- Doing Business: Women in Africa. A new report from the World Bank profiles seven women entrepreneurs, describing reasons for their success, as well as some of the legal, regulatory, and practical obstacles they faced in expanding their business efforts. The report also highlights reforms that can level the playing field for women and create better business environments that benefit both women and men. Learn more...
- Generate custom graphs: New graphing tools allows you to generate customized graphs in seconds. Create graphs of firms' top concerns about the business climate, or multi-country graphs of hundreds of possible indicators.
- Take a trip around the world to discover how easy (or difficult) it is to do business in more than 200 countries. Business Planet turns data into images. Business Planet uses Google maps technology to display data from Doing Business, Enterprise Surveys and other websites.
New research: Taking the Measure of Law: The Case of the Doing Business Project
Public Policy Journal: Doing Privatization Right: What It Takes to Maximize Gains in Low-Income Countries
Enterprise Surveys: New research explores business impact of civil and common law
New research: Highway improvement program in India shows widespread benefit
Doing Business methodologies: Now available in Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
Public Policy Journal: How the most successful reformers organized themselves
New research: What makes an entrepreneur?
Online Resources
Doing Business provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 178 economies.
Doing Business blog looks at the experiences and insights of the Doing Business team, its local partners, and successful reformers.
Doing Business Law Library is the largest free online collection of business laws and regulations.
Enterprise Surveys provides data on the investment climate in 104 countries, based on surveys of 70,000 firms.
Infrastructure Projects Database includes data on 3,800 private sector projects in 150 low- and middle-income countries.
Privatization Database is a barometer of privatization transactions in developing countries from 2000-06.