 Okay. I'm Dan Rundy. I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS. It is a real personal pleasure to host this event, a presentation of the World Bank Group's newly released Doing Business 2014 report. I think most of you know this, but if you don't, I believe that the World Bank Group's most important intellectual contribution it makes to development is the Doing Business Indicators and the investment climate work that's related to the Doing Business Indicators. I think we're coming at a particularly important moment and I know friends are going to speak to this in more detail, but I think there's been a significant review of in the last year or so of the Doing Business Indicators. President Kim has came out very strongly in support of the Doing Business Indicators and I think we're going to learn more about, well, A, the results this year but also sort of we're going to have a chance to have a conversation about the future of the Doing Business Indicators. They have been responsible for thousands of reforms all over the world in at least 100 countries. They're not perfect by any measure, but they certainly are something that's been a powerful tool for change. And sometimes it's not about having policy dialogue that's going to cause change. It's oftentimes about country rivalries and if you have a blood feud with your neighbor and you've told your populace for 100 years or 1,000 years that the neighbors across the river are terrible people or play into some terrible mythology of some national mythology and there are 100 points higher on the Doing Business Indicators. This is very embarrassing and creates cognitive dissonance. So sometimes it's not about the best study and sometimes it's not about the most persuasive academic. Sometimes it's about embarrassing political leaders to make change and I think sometimes that's one of the important reasons we have the Doing Business Indicators and the rankings that are associated with it. It's really wonderful to have my very good friend, Anna Palacio here, who's going to make some opening remarks. Anna Palacio is the former foreign minister of Spain. She's also the former general counsel at the World Bank Group. She was a member of the European Parliament. She was a member of the Parliament of Spain and I think and is a very accomplished lawyer and his friend to many of us here in Washington. I think when Anna was general counsel at the World Bank she brought both a lawyer's perspective and a former foreign minister's perspective and a former politician's perspective to the Indicators and I think that's why she made her such a gifted interlocutor with the Doing Business team and she made it easy for her to understand the value of it as well as some of the weaknesses of it. So Anna, without further ado, I'm going to have you come up. Thank you so much. Thank you. Please welcome Anna Palacio. You have to hold the mic because we... Well then, thank you. Thank you and honestly it's not rhetoric. If I just highlight the... I mean, how timely and how interesting this getting together is. Why? I mean, first, this is the eleventh doing business report. But it's not... It's just much more than the eleventh doing business report. This is the confirmation of the survival of the doing business report because this is the first thing that we have to address that the doing business report meant I, myself, when I just took a stand backing the doing business report after the high level panel or just concluded that the doing business report meant to delete the ranking and had to decaffeinate in the end what the doing business is. I'm a lawyer of continental low background and Michael Klein, who is the father of the doing business report, and I must say that the father and the originator of a way of addressing certain parameters that are subjective and the way to synthesize this subjective and quantitative data. And I think that doing business was a pioneer in this area and this has created a real score. It's doing business a perfect instrument. No, precisely because of this, because there is a component of subjectivity. And I remember Michael probably remembers to my discussions with him and my discussions and many times concentrated on a paragraph that just addressed the cumbersome step of the notaries of Latin approach, so the notaries in France, in Spain, and in many other countries in Europe. This was the paragraph that every politician from Spain, France, would call me and say, but Anna, you are a lawyer. Come on this paragraph. This is unacceptable. This is what is absolutely biased in favor of common low approaches. And we have a very bad ranking and we don't deserve this very bad ranking. And I remember discussing with Michael the opportunity of deleting this paragraph that in the end got deleted. But at the same time, I stood by the principles of doing business. Doing business has been improving. Improving just trying to address these different bias. And frankly, I think that what we have today is, as I say, not a perfect but a very interesting instrument. And the evidence of how interesting this instrument is, is but not as recently as last week in the European Council. The European Council is the meeting of the heads of state and government, so the highest level. The Cameron, so the British Prime Minister, presented a study on how in Europe we had to address red tape with exactly the same approach than doing business. And in my understanding, really inspired by doing business because it addressed the small and medium size enterprises. Of course, in the world there are very different measures of what is a small and medium size enterprise. But the European tissue, industrial and entrepreneurial tissue is of small and medium size enterprises. And of course the voice, I mean, it's not surprising the voice of France just said, not at all, we don't accept that this project was forward, this project provoked by Great Britain, because it will affect the health security and job security, which is the demagogic approach to try to counter any project. The day before yesterday I was in Brussels, and I was in Brussels participating in a reflection on how we could just make a more agile administration in the European Union. And of course, the doing business report is important for Europe, and as I said, many of its enemies are big countries in Europe, but it's also extremely important for the developing world. The example of Georgia has been mentioned, and Georgia really, there was a willingness to address and to address the parameters that were just the guiding parameters of the doing business. And the result, and I say this because I had the opportunity to discuss, is that the foreign direct investment increased exponentially after these measures were taken. So I conclude by saying that this is a very timely, a very interesting that how could we summarize what doing business is, is, I think it's an excellent, an excellent catalogue of imperfect indicators, but it's an excellent catalogue. And we, I commend President Kim that just stood by doing business report as it is, and not by a decaffeinated version of it that would have been absolutely useless. Thank you. Thank you, Anna, very, very much. I'm going to ask Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros to come up from the IFC, as part of the doing business team. I just want to make sure that the computer is working, and we're not going to have a technology. The good news is we moved into a new building. The bad news is it's sort of karaoke night here at CSIS, and you have to hold the microphone, and we're still working out the kinks of the technology and the AV stuff, and it'll be probably another month. At least we have AV, I've had several events where we haven't used any AV or microphones, and we've had to shout, so this is an improvement, and a month from now will be even better. But Augusto, please come on up and share the findings of the doing business 2014 rankings. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel, and Ms. Palacio, thank you for your introductory remarks. It's really a pleasure to be with you today. I'd like to spend two or three minutes before giving you an overview of the main insights that come from this year's report, just telling you a little bit about what it is exactly the doing business does for those of you who perhaps don't have some familiarity with some of the methodologies. Basically we cover by now 11 indicators in 189 countries. There is no claim made in the doing business report that this is everything that matters for creating a good business environment. This is essentially a narrow look at what matters for the business community and for the private sector. There are many other things which we don't capture in the doing business report, and we're really quite open and clear about the limitations. We have nothing to say on education and training. We don't really cover aspects of macroeconomic stability. We don't really look at issues of innovation and technology and so on. However, the indicators that we do cover do capture very important dimensions of the business environment. It does matter a great deal for the business community whether for instance you have a tax administration system that is very burdensome and very complicated, or whether it is light and simple and transparent. In fact, over the years in designing the indicators we have used two primary sources of insight for essentially capturing these dimensions of the business environment. One of them comes from the enterprise surveys that we do at the World Bank. By now, this is a very powerful machinery for collecting data in 125 countries, mainly in the developing world, that basically address the question of what are the bottlenecks for the business community? What are the main obstacles to the economic activity? From this ongoing research program, which is actually also in global indicators and analysis, the department at the bank that houses the Doing Business Project, we know that for instance, access to finance is very important for the business community. We know that infrastructure can be a very important bottleneck. We know that corruption is a great concern of the business community. Many of the indicators that we use in the Doing Business Project actually reflect the insights that come from the business community through the work that we have done. And then the other aspect has to do essentially with work that has been done in the academic community over the last 10, 15 years, a number of papers have been written and research projects have been underway that tell us things like, for instance, that those countries that make it more difficult for entrepreneurs to enter the market that put more obstacles to the creation of new businesses are also countries where you see very large levels of informality, where you see much higher levels of corruption. We have papers that have established quite clearly that delays to trade through excessive bureaucracy and red tape actually have a negative impact on the volumes of trade and therefore ultimately have an impact on economic growth. There is research that has shown that if you have excessively burdensome regulation of the labor market, this will tend to be associated with higher levels of unemployment, lower levels of labor force participation, higher levels of unemployment, especially for the young and so on. So the choice of the Doing Business Indicators has not been made in a vacuum. They reflect very important dimensions of what matters to the business community. The other comment I wanted to make very briefly is basically how do we go about collecting the data? This is very often a source of confusion. I have a number of my colleagues from the Doing Business team here in the audience and I think they will understand that this is perhaps one of the most complex things that the World Bank is doing at the moment and I think it's useful to just make a couple of points about how do we go about collecting the data. 72% of the data actually comes from a reading of the law. That is one of the sort of innovations about this project. We look at the commercial code or the company law to, for instance, find out what is the minimum capital requirement to get a business started. We look at the banking law to see do borrowers have the right to access their information from the main credit bureau. We look at the tax code to see what is the corporate profit tax rate or what are the investments that companies have to do every year to fulfill their tax obligations. We look at fees schedules to get a sense of what are the costs associated with registering a property and so on and so forth. So that's like three quarters of the data. The rest of the data we look at, we have developed a large network of experts on the ground, more than 10,000 by now in 199 countries and we have engagement with them, we have consultations with them to get a sense especially of the time component associated with some of the indicators. How long does it take to actually get a business started on the ground in reality? How long does it take to register property? How long does it take to enforce a contract when in-track? When in-track? When in-track? When in-track? When in-track? When in-track? 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