While Tyler and others have supported the continuation of the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” rankings, I think that we suffer from ranking fatigue. We have multiple rankings of business friendliness, multiple rankings of “economic freedom”, and the dreaded ICRG indices among many others.
There are many problems with these rankings.
First off, in a “confusing the map for the territory” / “cargo cult science” manner, countries are actually targeting the rankings! My grad student from Cote d’ Ivoire reports that his country is considering such a policy. In a very nice essay, Ricardo Hausmann reports that, “Many countries – including Colombia, Liberia, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia – have at some point made improvement in the Doing Business ranking, or that of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, a policy goal.”
Of course, since we have no notion of causality from the index (really any of the indices) to desirable…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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