Measuring and comparing World Bank regions’ ‘ease of doing business’ opportunity sets

This paper measures and compares the World Bank regions’ opportunity sets to promote ease of doing business for the years 2010 and 2019, as well as the time period 2010–2019. We combine the theoretical framework of Verbunt et al. (2020) and the non-parametric frontier estimation approach as proposed by Van Puyenbroeck and Rogge (2020) to construct and assess (changes in) the regions’ opportunity sets and best practice frontiers. The results reveal considerable differences across World Bank regions in ease of doing business, which decrease over the period of study. By 2019, the regions have grouped into two clusters: the leading high income OECD, Europe and Central Asia, and East Asia and Pacific, and the lagging Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The results prove to be consistent with the concept of development clustering.