Business Ready / B-READY

Business Ready (B-READY) is a flagship benchmarking exercise of the World Bank Group that evaluates and compares the regulatory environment and business climate across economies. It was unveiled in the Business Ready 2024 report, published on 3 October 2024, as the successor to the controversial Doing Business report, which the World Bank discontinued in September 2021 following an external probe (the WilmerHale investigation) into data irregularities affecting the rankings of China, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates in the 2018 and 2020 editions. B-READY was designed to restore methodological integrity and to broaden the scope of measurement beyond the firm-level convenience that Doing Business prioritised.

B-READY assesses economies across ten topics covering the life cycle of a firm: Business Entry, Business Location, Utility Services, Labor, Financial Services, International Trade, Taxation, Dispute Resolution, Market Competition, and Business Insolvency. Each topic is scored along three pillars — the regulatory framework (the rules), public services (the institutions and infrastructure that support those rules), and operational efficiency (the ease with which firms comply in practice). Crucially, B-READY explicitly incorporates cross-cutting themes such as digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender, marking a deliberate departure from Doing Business. Unlike its predecessor, B-READY relies on both expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys, and the World Bank has stated it will not produce a single aggregate ranking in the manner that made Doing Business politically combustible, instead presenting topic-by-topic and pillar-by-pillar scores.

The first edition, Business Ready 2024, covered 50 economies, with coverage planned to expand to roughly 180 economies in phases over subsequent cycles. India was not included in the initial 50-economy cohort but is expected in later editions, a point of keen interest for Indian aspirants given the country's past obsession with climbing the Doing Business rankings (India rose from 142nd in 2014 to 63rd in 2020 before the report's demise). The 2024 report ranked economies such as Singapore, Hungary and Georgia among the stronger performers on regulatory frameworks. As of 2026, B-READY remains in its scale-up phase, with the World Bank progressively enlarging the sample and refining the survey instruments.

For competitive examinations, B-READY belongs squarely to the current-affairs and economy segments — UPSC General Studies Paper III (economic development, planning, mobilisation of resources), the FSOT economics component, and the international-organisations sections of CSS and BCS. The typical question angle tests: that B-READY replaced Doing Business; the agency (World Bank Group) and year of launch (2024); the ten topics and three pillars; and the reasons for Doing Business's discontinuation (data-manipulation scandal). Candidates should be able to distinguish B-READY from other competitiveness indices such as the WEF Global Competitiveness Index, the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking, and the Index of Economic Freedom, and to note that B-READY deliberately avoids a headline composite rank to prevent the gaming and political pressure that discredited its predecessor.