Investment Attraction & Facilitation

Merchant cities across northern Europe negotiated shared legal protections, reduced tolls and guaranteed market access for their traders in foreign ports, an early collective effort to create a predictable commercial climate across borders.

Curbing the crown's power to grant arbitrary trading monopolies gave merchants and investors greater legal predictability, an early step toward the rules-based commercial environment that later underpinned confidence in English markets.

Minimal tariffs, a common-law legal system and a deep-water harbour attracted merchants and capital from across Asia, building the low-tax, business-friendly reputation that later underpinned its rise as a global financial centre.

Flexible rules on governance and low franchise taxes drew a wave of incorporations from businesses based elsewhere, demonstrating how a favourable legal and regulatory regime alone could become a durable competitive advantage in attracting capital.

Independent assessments of governments' ability to repay debt gave investors a standardised signal of political and economic stability, embedding credit ratings as a permanent influence on where international capital chose to flow.

Tax exemptions and industrial promotion aimed to draw manufacturing investment and shift the economy away from agriculture, an early and influential experiment in using fiscal incentives to engineer rapid industrialisation.

Widely regarded as the world's first modern export-processing zone, it offered manufacturers tax relief and duty-free imports in a defined area, a model of geographically targeted incentives that later spread to Asia, Latin America and Africa.

The Economist traced the intellectual origins of the Doing Business project to Hayek, who argued that a common-law approach was more amenable to freedom than a civil-law one. This legal-origins argument underpinned later regulatory benchmarking.

Annual comparisons of infrastructure, institutions, macroeconomic stability and business conditions gave investors a standardised reference point for judging one country's investment climate against another, reinforcing pressure on governments to address weaknesses.

Full foreign ownership, tax exemption and streamlined customs procedures around a new deep-water port created a template for the free-zone model that Gulf states and, later, economies worldwide used to compete for mobile international investment.

The paper presented comparative data on procedures, time and official cost required for start-up firms to operate legally in 85 countries. It found that heavier entry regulation correlated with higher corruption and larger unofficial economies without better public or private goods. Widely cited, it provided the quantitative foundation for later benchmarking of investment climates.

Guided by Joseph Stiglitz and Roumeen Islam with principal authors Simeon Djankov and Aart Kraay, the report analysed how institutional change occurs and stressed designs complementing existing institutions, human capabilities and technologies. It formed the research basis for the Doing Business project.

The three World Bank economists devised the index following the release of World Development Report 2002, with academic research conducted jointly with Edward Glaeser, Oliver Hart and Andrei Shleifer. Higher rankings signalled simpler business regulation and stronger property rights protection, giving governments a comparative yardstick for investment climate reform.

The World Bank Group began annual publication of the Doing Business report, developed by a team led by Simeon Djankov and issued every year from 2003, measuring the costs to firms of business regulations across up to 190 economies. The index ranked countries on the ease of starting a business, registering property and enforcing contracts, turning investment climate into an internationally comparable, competitive score that governments actively tried to improve, and became the leading global benchmark of regulatory ease.

Over eighteen years of publication the reports recorded almost 5,000 reforms across 190 economies, with annual bursts such as 201 reforms by 108 economies in 2011/12 and 238 reforms by 114 economies in 2012/13. Reform effort concentrated on easing business start-up, tax administration and cross-border trade.

Ranking of economies was added, turning the dataset into a league table. This sharpened the reputational incentive for governments to pursue regulatory reform.

The indicator was reworked in Doing Business 2008 to align with the 188 International Labour Organization conventions, after criticism that it rewarded weak labour protection. A follow-up note in April 2009 confirmed scoring in Doing Business 2010 would credit compliance with relevant ILO conventions.

The semi-independent watchdog within the World Bank Group assessed the index's methodology and influence. It was the first formal internal scrutiny of the benchmark.

Appointed by the President of the World Bank, the panel expressed concern that the report and index could be misinterpreted and that the indicators and information base were narrow. It marked the first high-level external challenge to the benchmark's credibility.

The international trade union confederation created its own index in response to Doing Business, which it saw as rewarding deregulation of labour. It established a rival measure of national conditions emphasising workers' rights.

Only 22% of Africans aged 18 to 24 said they knew about the African Continental Free Trade Area, a share unchanged since 2022, underlining a persistent awareness gap that limits how far businesses and entrepreneurs can exploit continental market access.

The offering disposed of a 25% stake in First Bank of Nigeria acquired during a four-year fight for control between two Nigerian businessmen, a test of investor appetite for one of the country's largest listed financial groups.

The tax authority issued detailed rules bringing virtual asset transactions fully into the tax net, part of a broader effort to formalise digital finance and bring an unregulated segment of the investment climate under clearer rules.

The National Treasury and central bank proposed requirements for cross-border crypto transfers to comply with existing exchange-control rules, extending regulatory oversight into a fast-growing channel for capital movement in and out of the country.

A 20-year deal with Nigeria's Bergmans will digitise customs procedures and track cargo across 50 countries, aiming to curb corruption and revenue leakage as intra-African trade, which reached $220 billion in 2024, is targeted to double by 2035.

The securities regulator approved trading of tokenised equities and bonds on the NASD over-the-counter exchange, a step intended to widen access to capital markets and modernise the trading infrastructure available to investors.

The new platform brought together investors and delegations from Turkey, China and India, part of a push to extend investment facilitation beyond the capital and diversify the sources of foreign capital seeking opportunities in the country.

Ordinance No. 2025/002, ratified in December 2025, links tax and customs incentives more closely to job creation, local content and technology transfer, while the Investment Promotion Agency's nationwide call sought projects for the November Cameroon Investment Forum.

A decade of index data showed volatility that once spiked and receded after shocks such as the 2018-2019 trade war no longer returning to its old baseline, leaving highly integrated manufacturing economies exposed to persistently higher investment risk.

The licences, granted across the WAEMU zone, extended sharia-compliant financing options to businesses and households, broadening the range of investment and credit channels available within the regional bloc's financial system.

After two delays, the successor to Doing Business appeared under the Business Ready moniker. It restored a global standardised assessment of regulatory conditions for business after a three-year gap.

A paper by Torino researchers identified significant positive effects on economic growth from reforms associated with the index. It countered arguments that the benchmark's reforms had no measurable macroeconomic payoff.

The document set out motivation, indicators, questionnaires, benchmarking parameters, scoring rules and data sources for twelve topic areas. Worldwide methodology workshops followed to publicise the new benchmarking initiative for reform advocacy and policy advice.

A grant to Professor Robert Lawson at Southern Methodist University supported proposing a methodology to revive the index within academia. It was one of several efforts, alongside the Antigua Forum and the Fraser Institute, to fill the gap left by Doing Business.

The Bank ended the project on 14 September 2021 after a WilmerHale audit documented how senior leadership pressured experts to manipulate the 2018 and 2020 results, implicating Jim Yong Kim, Kristalina Georgieva and Simeon Djankov. The world lost its dominant standardised measure of national investment climates, prompting several organisations to propose replacements.

Following reports that data for China, Azerbaijan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia had been inappropriately altered in the 2020 edition, the Bank suspended the report and began a review of data changes across the last five reports plus an internal data-integrity audit. Three review reports were released in December 2020, finding a culture of management pressure to manipulate data.

The World Bank's chief economist said results going back at least four years would be revisited amid concerns about methodology changes affecting country scores. The announcement opened the sequence of data-integrity controversies around the index.

Following a board decision, scoring shifted to a distance-to-frontier metric. Subsequent research found this measure was not correlated with later economic growth or investment, weakening claims that the index tracked investment outcomes.

Doing Business 2015 collected data for two cities in each of eleven economies with over 100 million inhabitants, including China, India, Brazil and the United States. This enabled sub-national comparison and benchmarking of investment climates within very large countries.