THE WORLD BANK’S Doing Business rankings, which are followed closely by leaders in China, India and elsewhere, are supposed to gauge how easy it is to do business in 190 countries. But the rankings have instead become a revealing gauge of how the World Bank itself does business under political pressure. In so doing, they have also created a dilemma for the bank’s sister institution, the IMF.
In January the bank appointed a law firm to investigate allegations that the scores for China and three other countries (Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) had been altered. Its findings, released on September 16th, provide a startlingly frank, blow-by-blow account of the bank’s efforts in 2017 to engineer an improvement in China’s ranking. According to the investigators, the amendments reflected pressure from aides to Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank’s president at the time, “presumably” at his direction. And the effort was ultimately led by Kristalina Georgieva, who was then second-in-command at the bank and is now the boss of the IMF.