How transparent is business regulation around the world?

The World Bank Enterprise Surveys suggest that there is much room for improvement in service quality and accountability in business regulation. A sizable body of literature already attests to the importance of information in ensuring the quality of public services in such areas as health, sanitation and education. But thus far little attention has been paid to this role of information in the administrative branches of government that implement business regulation, such as company and property registries, building departments and power distribution utilities.

This study fills this gap by presenting new data that speak to the efforts at transparency made by government agencies tasked with implementing business regulation. The data capture how governments make basic regulatory information such as fee schedules available to businesses. The new data on the accessibility of regulatory information, collected between January and August 2012, measure how easy it is to access fee schedules for 4 regulatory processes in the largest business city of an economy: incorporating a new company, obtaining a building permit, connecting a business to electricity and transferring property.

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Source: The World Bank Group & International Finance Corporation