EoDB RANKING CONTROVERSY

Raises Concerns Across The World

After reviewing all the information available to the data on Doing Business including the findings of past reviews, audits and the final report released by the World Bank, the management decided to discontinue the Doing Business report. Internal audits had been triggered in June 2020 by repeated allegations of data manipulation and internal audit found that Chinese influence at the World bank led to data manipulation and ultimately a rigged national ranking for China in past Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) indexes.

                                             In particular, it was alleged that EoDB rankings were tweaked to inflate the ranks for China (in EoDB 2018) and Saudi Arabia, UAE and Azerbaijan (EoDB 2020). The World bank staff did indeed fudge data to help China's ranking and did so under pressure from Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. These I findings are particularly damning by China is the third-largest shareholder in the World bank after the US and Japan and is being seen as manipulating its way to higher rankings. Even before this controversy, it was openly known that there are several gaps in the rankings. This is not the world bank's first brush with a scandal. In January 2018, Paul Romer, the World Bank's chief economist, announced that past releases of the index would be corrected and recalculated going back at least four years.

                                                The sudden discrediting of the rankings has brought into question the framework of the report, its intent and the entire process. Some officials fear this will discredit India's overall ease of doing business endeavor. However, most officials believe it will help in exposing how China bullies multilateral institutions to accommodate its demands. With global opinion on the matter slowly becoming clear, they hope this will lead to more businesses shifting from China to India. India is currently wooing businesses to shift their supply chains from China through a range of incentives.