El problema con el Doing Business
Overall, we find that the single numerical estimate of legally required time
for firms to complete certain legal and regulatory processes provided by the Doing
Business survey does not summarize even modestly well the experience of firms as
reported by the Enterprise Surveys... The most interesting difference between these two approaches to assessing the
business or investment climate is that Doing Business focuses on de jure processes
and Enterprise Surveys on de facto practice.
The Doing Business estimates are problematic
in four ways:
First, there is huge variance reported by firms within the same country.
Second, the average times reported de facto in the Enterprise Surveys are much,
much less than de jure times reported by Doing Business... at low values of the Doing Business time (estimated
assuming full regulatory compliance) there are some countries in which the median
of Enterprise Surveys responses (reflecting actual experiences) is above the Doing
Business value. But at higher levels (above 30 days), the reported medians from the
Enterprise Surveys are nearly uniformly below the de jure Doing Business values...
Third, there is almost
zero correlation across countries between the single Doing Business survey number
and the Enterprise Survey responses of firms.
Fourth, for those countries with
repeated Enterprise Surveys data, changes in the reported Doing Business times are
not strongly associated with changes in actual times as reported in the Enterprise
Surveys, and if anything, reductions in Doing Business times are associated with
higher reported actual times in the Enterprise Surveys... When firms are asked about time to obtain an operating license or a
construction permit, or to clear goods through customs, the responses not only do
not cluster tightly around the Doing Business value, they also do not cluster around
the Enterprise Surveys central tendency. A significant fraction of firms report that
regulatory compliance (or their version of compliance) takes essentially no time at
all, while others report significant delays... The Enterprise Surveys data show that there is typically
far more variation across firms in the same country than in the typical firm across
countries.
When strict de jure regulation and high rates of taxation meet weak governmental
capabilities for implementation and enforcement, we argue that researchers
and policymakers should stop thinking about regulations as creating “rules” to be
followed, but rather as creating a space in which “deals” of various kinds are possible... It is commonly observed that policy implementation often deviates
from the stated policy in firm-specific ways, but this hypothesis has not been easy
to document. It appears that when strict rules meet weak state capability—or, more
broadly, “institutions”—the rules bend and become more like individuated “deals”
where outcomes are not the result of a neutral application of policy to the facts but
rather have to be negotiated case by case.
Within this space there will be winners and losers—among firms and among officials.
The structure of these deals can in some cases reduce times to get permits, but
the very uncertainty itself can favor officials... one
hypothesis for explaining the differential responses to “policy reform” may be that
when de jure and de facto policy diverge, the impact of de jure reform might have
wildly different effects
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