The World Bank has increased financial support for the cotton sector in Uzbekistan, despite evidence that the industry is rooted in a system of forced labour. Credit: David Stanley/CC-BY-2.0

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 22 2015 (IPS)

For an entire month beginning in February 2015, a group of between 40 and 50 residents of the Durgapur Village in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand would gather at the site of a hydroelectric power project being carried out by the state-owned Tehri Hydro Development Corporation (THDC).

All day long the protestors, mostly women and their children, would sit in defiance of the initiative that they believed was an environmental and social danger to their community, singing folk songs that spoke of their fears and hopes.

“I had expected a very constructive conversation with the World Bank. Instead all I am hearing are non-responses." -- Jessica Evans, senior advocate on international financial institutions at Human Rights Watch
Their actions were well within the bounds of the law, but the reactions of THDC employees to their peaceful demonstration were troubling in the extreme.

According to one of the women involved, THDC contractors and labourers routinely harassed them by hurling abusive slurs – going so far as to call the women ‘prostitutes’ and make derogatory comments about their caste – and attempted to intimidate them by threatening “severe” consequences if they didn’t call off their picket.

In a country where activists and communities demanding their rights are routinely subjected to identical or worse treatment at the hands of both state and private actors, this tale may not seem at all out of the ordinary.

What sets it apart, however, is that this hydroelectric project was not simply a government-led scheme; it is financed by a 648-million-dollar loan from the World Bank.

Governed by a set of “do no harm” policies, both the Bank and its private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) have – on paper at least – pledged to consult with and protect local communities impacted by its funding.

But according to a new report by Human Rights Watch, the Bank has not only systematically turned a blind eye to reports of human rights abuses associated with its projects, it also lacks necessary safeguards required to avoid further violations in the future.

When silence and negligence equals complicity

Based on research carried out over a two-year period between May 2013 and May 2015, in Cambodia, India, Uganda and Kyrgyzstan – the latter following allegations of rights abuses in Uzbekistan – the report entitled ‘At Your Own Risk: Reprisals Against Critics of World Bank Group Projects’ found that Bank officials consistently fail to respond in any meaningful way to allegations of severe reprisals against those who speak out against Bank-funded projects.

In some cases, the World Bank Group has even turned its back on local community members working with its own officials.

Addressing the press on a conference call on Jun. 22, the report’s author, Jessica Evans, highlighted an incident in which an interpreter for the Bank’s Inspection Panel was flung into prison just weeks after the oversight body concluded its review process.

Withholding all identifying details of the case for the security of the victim, Evans stated that, besides questioning government officials “behind closed doors”, the Bank has so far remained completely silent on the fate of an independent activist working to strengthen the Bank’s own process.

Such actions, or lack thereof, “make a mockery out of [the Bank’s] own stated commitments to participation and accountability,” the report concluded.

HRW has identified dozens of cases in which activists claim to have been targeted – harassed, abused, threatened or intimidated – for voicing their objections to aspects of Bank or IFC-funded initiatives for a range of social, environmental or economic reasons.

Because the bulk of communities in close proximity to major development schemes tend to be among the poorest or most vulnerable, and therefore lack the access or ability to formally lodge their complaints, the true number of people who have experienced such reprisals is “sure” to be much higher than the figures stated in the report, researchers revealed.

Evans told IPS, “On this issue of reprisals the World Bank’s silence and inaction has already crossed the line” into the realm of compliance.

She added that the Inspection Panel raised the issue of retaliation back in 2009, giving the Bank ample time to take necessary steps to address a chronic and pervasive problem.

Instead, it continues to engage with governments that have a poor human rights track record, while remaining apparently deaf to pressures and demands from civil society to strengthen mechanisms that will protect powerless and marginalized communities from violent backlash.

Take the case of Elena Urlaeva, who heads the Tashkent-based Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan, and who was arrested in a cotton field on May 31, 2015, while documenting evidence of the Uzbek government’s massive system of forced labour in cotton production.

According to HRW, Urlaeva was detained, abused and sexually violated during an extremely violent cavity probe. On the grounds that they were searching for a data card from her camera, male doctors and policemen conducted such a rough and invasive search that the ordeal left her bleeding.

She was forbidden from using the bathroom and eventually forced to go outside the station in the presence of male officers who called her a “bitch”, filmed her in the act of relieving herself and threatened to post the video online if she complained about her treatment.

Evans told IPS all of this occurred against a backdrop of the World Bank’s increased financial support of the cotton sector – already it has pledged over 450 million dollars to three major agricultural projects of the Uzbek government – despite evidence that the industry is rooted in a system of forced labour.

In the absence of any robust mechanism within the World Bank to make continued funding conditional on compliance with international human rights standards, there is a “real risk” that independent monitors and rights activists will continue to face situations as horrific as the one Urlaeva recently endured, Evans stressed.

A ‘disappointing’ reaction

Both the World Bank and the United Nations have tossed the issue of development-related rights abuses from one forum to another.

In his May 2015 report to the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC), Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston stressed the urgency of “putting questions of resources and redistribution back into the human rights equation.”

He decried several member states’ attempts to keep international economics, finance and trade “quarantined” from the human rights framework, and blasted international financial institutions (IFIs) for contributing to this culture of impunity.

“The World Bank can simply refuse to engage with human rights in the context of its policies and programmes, IMF does the same, and the World Trade Organisation is little different,” Alston remarked, adding that these bodies throw the issue at the HRC, while the latter simply knocks the ball back into the financiers’ court.

It is becoming akin to a game of political ping-pong, with the ball representing the human rights of some of the most impoverished people in the world – at whom multi-million-dollar development projects are ostensibly targeted.

Gretchen Gordon, coordinator of Bank on Human Rights, a global coalition of social movements and grassroots organisations working to hold IFIs accountable to human rights obligations, told IPS, “You can’t have successful development without robust civil society participation in setting development priorities, designing projects, and monitoring implementation.”

If development banks and their member states neglect to take leadership and implement the necessary protocols and policies, she said, “they will continue to see increasing development failures, human rights abuses, and conflict.”

If the World Bank Group’s initial reaction to HRW’s comprehensive research is anything to go by, however, Bank on Human Rights and other watchdogs of its ilk have their work cut out for them.

Though HRW’s researchers invited the Bank and the IFC’s input with an in-depth list of questions back in April, they have received nothing but a rather “bland response” that failed to address the issue of reprisals at all and simply stated that the Bank “is not a human rights tribunal.”

“I had expected a very constructive conversation with the World Bank,” Evans said. “Instead all I am hearing are non-responses. We have proposed really pragmatic recommendations for how the Bank can work effectively in challenging environments, but we are a long way from that at the moment.”

Both the Bank’s Inspection Panel and the IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) have greeted the report with enthusiasm, but they are independent bodies and remain largely powerless to effect change at the management level of the World Bank Group.

This power lies with the Bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, who will have to “take the lead and send a clear message to his staff that the question of reprisals is a priority issue,” Evans concluded.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Nearly 50 percent of the estimated 3.4 million people who were physically or economically displaced by World Bank-funded projects in the last decade were from Africa and Asia. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 16 2015 (IPS)

An expose published Thursday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its media partners has revealed that in the course of a single decade, 3.4 million people were evicted from their homes, torn away from their lands or otherwise displaced by projects funded by the World Bank.

Over 50 journalists from 21 countries worked for nearly 12 months to systematically analyse the bank’s promise to protect vulnerable communities from the negative impacts of its own projects.

"The situation is simply untenable and unconscionable. Enough is enough.” -- Kate Geary Oxfam’s land advocacy lead
Reporters around the world – from Ghana to Guatemala, Kenya to Kosovo and South Sudan to Serbia – read through thousands of pages of World Bank records, interviewed scores of people including former Bank employees and carefully documented over 10 years of lapses in the financial institution’s practices, which have rendered poor farmers, urban slum-dwellers, indigenous communities and destitute fisherfolk landless, homeless or jobless.

In several cases, reporters found that whole communities who happened to live in the pathway of a World Bank-funded project were forcibly removed through means that involved the use of violence, or intimidation.

Such massive displacement directly violates the Bank’s decades-old Twin Goals of “[ending] extreme poverty by reducing the share of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day to less than three percent of the global population by 2030 [and] promote shared prosperity by improving the living standards of the bottom 40 percent of the population in every country” – goals that the Bank promised to “pursue in ways that sustainably secure the future of the planet and its resources, promote social inclusion, and limit the economic burdens that future generations inherit.”

Far from finding sustainable ways of closing the vast wealth gaps that exist between the world richest and poorest people, between 2009 and 2013 “World Bank Group lenders pumped 50 billion dollars into projects graded the highest risk for “irreversible or unprecedented” social or environmental impacts — more than twice as much as the previous five-year span.”

The investigation further revealed, “The World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations such as rape, murder and torture. In some cases the lenders have continued to bankroll these borrowers after evidence of abuses emerged.”

Nearly 50 percent of the estimated 3.4 million people who were physically or economically displaced by large-scale projects – ostensibly aimed at improving water and electricity supplies or beefing up transport and energy networks in some of the world’s most impoverished nations – reside in Africa, or one of three Asian nations: China, India and Vietnam.

Between 2004 and 2013, the World Bank, together with the IFC, pledged 455 billion dollars for the purpose of rolling out 7,200 projects in the developing world. In that same time period, complaints poured in from communities around the world that both the lenders and borrowers were flouting their own safeguards policies.

In Ethiopia, for instance, reporters from the ICIJ team found that government officials siphoned millions of dollars from the two billion dollars the Bank poured into a health and education initiative, and used the money to fund a campaign of mass evictions that sought to forcibly remove two million poor people from their lands.

Over 95,000 people in Ethiopia have been displaced by World Bank-funded projects.

Financial intermediaries

In a report released earlier this month, Oxfam claimed that the “International Finance Corporation has little accountability for billions of dollars’ worth of investments into banks, hedge funds and other financial intermediaries, resulting in projects that are causing human rights abuses around the world.”

In the four years leading up to 2013, Oxfam found that the IFC invested 36 billion dollars in financial intermediaries, 50 percent more than the sum spent on health and three times more than the Bank spent on education during that same period.

The new model, of pumping money into an investment portfolio in financial intermediaries, now makes up 62 percent of the IFC’s total investment portfolio, but the “painful truth is that the IFC does not know where much of its money under this new model is ending up or even whether it’s helping or harming,” Nicolas Mombrial, head of Oxfam International’s Washington DC office, said in a statement on Apr. 2.

Investments made to what the Bank classifies as “high-risk” intermediaries have caused conflict and hardship for thousands on palm oil, sugarcane and rubber plantations in Honduras, Laos, and Cambodia; at a dam site in Guatemala; around a power plant in India; and in the areas surrounding a mine in Vietnam, according to Oxfam’s research.

In response to widespread criticism over such lapses, the Bank is now in the process of overhauling its safeguards policy, but officials say that instead of making vulnerable communities safer, the new policy will only serve to increase their risk of displacement.

Citing current and former Bank employees, the ICIJ investigation claims, “[The] latest draft of the new policy, released in July 2014, would give governments more room to sidestep the Bank’s standards and make decisions about whether local populations need protecting.”

In a response to the ICIJ investigation released today, Oxfam’s land advocacy lead Kate Geary stated, “ICIJ’s findings echo what Oxfam has long been saying: that the World Bank Group – and its private sector arm the IFC in particular – is sometimes failing those people who it aims to benefit: the poorest and most marginalised […].

“It’s not just Oxfam and the ICIJ who say this – these disturbing findings are backed up by the Bank’s own internal audits which found, shockingly, that the Bank simply lost track of people who had to be “resettled” by its projects. President Kim himself has acknowledged this as a failure – and he’s right. The situation is simply untenable and unconscionable. Enough is enough.”

She stressed that the Bank must “provide redress through grant funding to those people it has displaced and left worse off […], enact urgent and fundamental reforms to ensure that these tragedies are not repeated [and] revise its ‘Action Plan on Resettlement’, released just last month by Kim in response to the critical audits, because it is inadequate to stem the terrible results of the worst of these projects.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The vast majority of investment in Myanmar is concentrated in Yangon and other cities. Credit: Jose Javier Martin Espartosa/CC CC BY-SA 2.0

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Jun 1 2014 (IPS)

New investments from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private-sector investment arm, may perpetuate economic inequality rather than alleviate poverty in Myanmar, critics here are warning.

The IFC has proposed five new investment projects for Myanmar (also known as Burma). But the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a rights group here, is calling on the multilateral funder to slow down these projects and analyse their potential social effects.

“The IFC has the responsibility to use its financial influence to promote transparency and reform in Burma’s corrupt business environment,” Rachel Wagley, the group’s policy director, said this week.

“Regrettably, the IFC’s recent investment proposals seem to mark a deviation from the IFC’s earlier objective to bolster the growth of microfinance in Burma and may instead exacerbate socioeconomic inequality in the country.”

In 2012, the U.S. Congress repealed sanctions prohibiting U.S. investment in Myanmar to signal its support for the country’s new nominally reformist government, which was slowly instituting democratic reforms after decades under military dictatorship.

That same year, the Washington-based IFC opened its office in Myanmar and began to assess the country’s investment and business climate. Given that over 30 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, IFC officials decided that the country office’s goal would be poverty alleviation, and eventually proposed five investment projects aimed at achieving this goal.

Yet of those five, three involve the construction of upscale hotels. The U.S. Campaign for Burma says it is alarmed by what appears to be a lack of environmental and social safeguards.

For one of the projects, which would develop four hotels, the IFC’s expected development impact is to “create 437 direct and indirect jobs (46 percent female) … and create demand for locally-sourced materials, services, and labour.” In addition, the project would “contribute to the domestic economies through increased tax revenue and foreign exchange inflows.”

The goal of another project, to build a business complex and more hotels, is to install what the IFC calls “critical business infrastructure”.

“The Project will add much needed supply of international standard office, retail and hospitality infrastructure to Yangon,” a project document states. “International standard business infrastructure such as these are of critical importance in attracting foreign investments in the country.”

Yet U.S. Campaign for Burma executive director Jennifer Quigley notes that the international business community has been flocking to the country since 2012.

“And any problems are not for lack of hotel rooms – that’s not what Burma needs to have a thriving business environment,” Quigley told IPS. “The issue isn’t a lack of funding but restrictions that make sure only a few benefit monetarily from foreign trade and investment.”

Safeguards concern

Another of the IFC-proposed projects, known as Yoma Equity, would provide about 30 million dollars to a programme run by Yoma Bank, a national institution, to finance small- and medium-sized businesses. Such investments are aimed at increasing access to finance for small-scale ventures and to fuel growth in the country’s private sector.

Yet while Quigley’s office supports IFC funding for small- and medium-sized enterprises, she worries that the project will not be well regulated.

“It’s widely considered that the performance standards of the IFC are very good, but then the IFC doesn’t require them to be applied,” she says. “Over 50 percent of projects are classified in such a way that they don’t require the standards.”

The IFC categorises projects in one of four ways, three of which are regulated by the agency’s environmental and social performance standards. The fourth type of project, however, known as FI for ‘financial intermediary’, is excused from these assessments.

Yoma Equity, for instance, is classified as FI-2, meaning that “its business activities have potential limited adverse environmental or social risks or impacts that are few in number,” according to the IFC’s website.

Yet according to Serene Jweied, a spokesperson for the IFC, even FI projects must follow regulations.

“Every financial institution we work with must adhere to our environmental and social requirements and integrity standards,” Jweied told IPS.

“Should IFC engage with Yoma Bank, this requirement would apply to this client as well, and Yoma Bank would have to develop an environmental and social management system commensurate with the risks of the projects and/or clients it finances.”

However, once Yoma Bank develops its own safeguards, as a financial intermediary the IFC would leave any assessment of these safeguards up to the bank itself.

Last year, an independent assessment by the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman, an internal auditor, criticised the IFC’s regulations of financial intermediaries.

The report looked, for instance, at a loan for 30 million dollars that the IFC gave to Corporation Dinant, a Honduran agribusiness company owned by one of the country’s richest men, Miguel Facusse. Dinant has been accused of killing, kidnapping or forcibly evicting peasants from land claimed by the company.

In response, the IFC has admitted to missteps around Dinant.

Reinforcing oligarchy

In the case of Yoma Equity, the intermediary corporation is less shady than Dinant but, according to observers, still questionable.

Serge Pun chairs the Serge Pun & Associates Group (SPA Group), one of Myanmar’s largest conglomerates, as well as Yoma Bank.

Quigley notes that Pun’s business dealings have raised social concerns in various sectors over the years. Indeed, the U.S. State Department recommended placing sanctions on Pun in 2008.

These never went forward, however, and as a result Pun has developed a reputation in Myanmar as a “good crony”: less corrupt than the others, and one of the few options for a local business partner.

“Everyone is investing in him,” she says, “so the IFC is perpetuating the same oligarchy that’s in place. The IFC is coming in and reinforcing the status quo.”

Meanwhile, the potential broader impact of the IFC’s projects is also under scrutiny. The majority of Burmese live in rural areas, after all, and agriculture is the livelihood of up to 70 percent of the population, according to Oxfam.

Yet most of the IFC’s projects are focusing on urban areas. Experts say this is simply continuing a broader trend being seen in Myanmar since its economy began to open up.

“A significant factor contributing to the urban versus rural income inequality is that the vast majority of investment in Burma is concentrated in the urban sector, despite the fact that only one-third of the population lives in these areas,” Dennis McCornac, of Loyola University, stated in a recent essay.

Satellite image of the Gulf of San Jorge in Argentina's Patagonia region, rich in shale gas and part of the world's second largest reserve after China, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Credit: IPS/Photostock

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 18 2013 (IPS)

Non-governmental organisations are putting pressure on multilateral financial institutions not to finance production of shale gas by hydraulic fracturing or fracking because of the high environmental costs they say are associated with this method.

“I think it’s terrible: fracking is one of the techniques posing the highest risk to availability of drinking water in the country,” Nathalie Seguin, the coordinator of the Freshwater Action Network in Mexico (FANMEX), which works for water sustainability, told IPS. “These plans make no sense and must be thwarted.”

“Sound scientific research in several parts of the world has clearly shown a high risk of leaching from vertical wells into water tables,” she said.

Fracking is the technique used for large-scale extraction of non-conventional fossil fuels trapped in rocks, like shale gas.

To release the natural gas, huge volumes of water containing toxic chemicals are pumped underground at high pressure, fracturing the shale. The process generates large amounts of waste liquids containing dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that require treatment before disposal.

Timothé Feodoroff, with the Agrarian Justice Programme of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI), said “Some international institutions are keen to finance fracking. It’s a real risk” that they will invest in the method.

Feodoroff is a co-author, together with Jennifer Franco and Ana María Rey, of a report published in January titled “Old Story, New Threat: Fracking and the global land grab”, which reveals that “behind the scenes in the worldwide scramble for unconventional gas exploration and extraction are a wide range of public and private transnational, national and institutional actors.”

The actors include technology providers, oil and financial companies, governments, lobbying firms and even academic institutions.

TNI will publish another report in September addressing the financial bubble surrounding shale gas fuelled by banks and private investment firms.

“We found that the money was given by Wall Street firms; there is a lot of speculation around fracking. In the 2007 subprime crisis they did the same. There are a lot of investment banks involved, the speculation isn’t over,” Feodoroff told IPS.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector lending arm of the World Bank, assured IPS it had no plans to grant any loans for hydraulic fracturing.

However, the IFC owns 10 percent of the Agiba Petroleum Company, made up of Egypt’s General Petroleum Corporation, Italy’s Eni SpA and Russia’s Lukoil, which carries out fracking in the “Falak” and “Dorra” fields in the Egyptian desert.

The Inter-American Development Bank, which did not reply to IPS’ request for information about its plans to finance fracking, published a report in December by David Mares titled “The New Energy Landscape: Shale Gas in Latin America”, which is not available to the public.

But another report, “Shale Gas in Latin America: Opportunities and Challenges“, by the same expert, analyses the outlook for shale gas in the region.

“The main issues that will determine which Latin American countries become part of the shale gas revolution revolve around the needs of investors, the state of the environmental debate, and the ability of the state to provide security for exploration and production operations,” says the report, published in July by Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.

Mares says that development of shale gas resources will vary from country to country, and that financing may come from local sources, foreign direct investment, investment portfolios, and state investment and loans.

Mexico’s state oil company PEMEX has drilled at least six wells in shale rock in this country since 2011 in the northern states of Nuevo León and Coahuila, and the state Mexican Institute of Petroleum (IMP) is preparing for 18 months of geological exploration in the southeastern state of Veracruz at a cost of 245 million dollars.

IMP plans to drill 20 wells by 2016, with an investment of over two billion dollars, and in the next 50 years plans to have 6,500 wells in commercial operation.

The United States’ Energy Information Administration (EIA) ranks Mexico sixth in the world for technically recoverable gas, behind China, Argentina, Algeria, the United States and Canada, based on examination of 137 deposits in 42 countries. Mexico is in eighth position for technically recoverable oil reserves.

NGOs are considering launching an international campaign against the financing of fracking, and are preparing worldwide actions for Global Frackdown Day, to be held Oct. 19.

Seguin said, “The problem is the heavy pressure from private companies and governments for financing these activities.

“It is in the interests of the multilateral financial institutions to lend money. They support infrastructure mega-projects because it is the easiest way to trap countries into debt and to maintain themselves. This financing runs counter to their own environmental and social standards. Why should we exploit shale gas, when it is a major threat?” she asked.

Six organisations have joined together to create the Mexican Alliance Against Fracking, which has not yet decided whether to call for a moratorium or an outright ban on the method in a forthcoming report on the energetic, economic, social and environmental aspects of shale gas.

Feodoroff said, “It’s possible that big banks influence the multilateral agencies. We are warning about corporate power” over their decisions.

The Dutch Rabobank Group, a sustainability-oriented cooperative financial services company specialising in agricultural products and commodities, announced that it would not lend funds for exploration and production of shale gas, a move that experts hope will be imitated by other private institutions.

In his analysis, Mares says “the development of Latin America’s shale gas potential faces significant challenges, and it is not clear that the region will address them successfully.” He warns that Mexico, Argentina and Brazil may face serious problems over shale gas exploitation.

An external review panel is calling on the World Bank to institute sweeping reforms to its widely cited annual “Doing Business” report, including doing away with a controversial ranking of countries on a variety of business-friendliness metrics.

Doing Business is put out jointly by the World Bank and its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), both based here in Washington, and has become one of the bank’s most high-profile publications.

“Over the decade that it has been published, Doing Business has achieved a great deal of influence,” Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s planning minister and chair of the review panel, said Monday at the audit’s London unveiling.

“It is the leading tool to judge the business environments of developing countries, generating huge global media coverage every year. Several countries – such as Rwanda – have used it as a guide to design reform programmes.”

Indeed, reportedly used by some 85 percent of global policymakers, the report has built up particularly outsized influence in the developing world, as government officials have competed to raise their index ranking.

Yet for this reason, critics have for years warned that the report was pushing countries to lower taxes and wages and weaken overall industry regulation, thus potentially endangering the poor.

On Monday, the 11-member panel, appointed in October by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, offered strong backing for several of these criticisms, even while it stated that the report should continue to be published. Most prominent among these is the recommendation to do away with the aggregated Ease of Doing Business Index, introduced in 2006.

“The decision to retain or drop the aggregate rankings table is the most important decision the Bank faces with regard to the Doing Business report,” the review states.

“Removing it would defuse many of the criticisms levelled against the report, but would diminish the report’s influence on policy and public discussion in the short term. In the long term, however, doing so may improve focus on underlying substantive issues and enhance the report’s value.”

The report also calls for greater transparency within the reporting and evaluation processes, and urges the bank to move the report’s “home” from the IFC to the research department within the bank proper. This latter recommendation could be particularly important given past criticisms that the Doing Business team has been reticent to implementing any major changes.

In an unusual public statement ahead of the review’s publication, President Kim suggested that plans were afoot to make just such a change. Yet he also sketched out a clear stance on the overall importance of both the report and its rankings.

“It is indisputable that Doing Business has been an important catalyst in driving reforms around the world,” Kim said on Jun. 7. (The bank declined IPS’s request for further comment Monday.) “I am committed to the Doing Business report, and rankings have been part of its success.”

Pure knowledge

The Ease of Doing Business Index rankings are based on metrics drawn from 10 regulations and other factors impacting on a country’s business environment. These include permitting and registering, ease of getting credit and electricity, the legal framework for enforcing contracts and protecting investors, how much tax a company must pay and how a government regulates cross-border trade.

These data points are then distilled down to a single score, allowing World Bank researchers to rank all 185 countries the report covers. The 2013 rankings awarded top scores to Singapore and Hong Kong and bottom scores to Chad and the Central African Republic.

Yet the review panel is now warning that such aggregation tends to cloud crucial country-level variations.

“It is important to remember that the report is intended to be a pure knowledge project,” the review states. “As such, its role is to inform policy, not to prescribe it or outline a normative position, which the rankings to some extent do.”

The past year has seen significant pushback against such criticism of the rankings, from prominent voices within the business community as well as certain development scholars.

“I think these rankings really do have fundamental value, as without the rankings the Doing Business report is just one more research exercise among many the World Bank does,” Scott Morris, a visiting policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“It is because of the ranking that this report has unique value to those countries that have a long way to go on economic reform. Think of a small sub-Saharan African country with a reformist government in place – how does it get international leverage for reform or gain global attention for what it has accomplished? The rankings exercise, with its very high profile, is tremendously valuable in this regard.”

Regulatory opportunity

While the Doing Business report has received regular low-level criticism since its introduction, much of this was technical.

Over the past year, however, the issue has become far more politicised, with certain countries – led by China – complaining that the report was biased in favour of capitalist systems. Beijing has wanted the World Bank to halt publication of the report outright.

Meanwhile, humanitarian, labour and other progressive groups have also stepped up calls to reform the report. On Monday, many of these groups found the panel review to be surprisingly in line with their own worries about Doing Business leading to a weakening of regulation.

“After years of working with small and micro enterprises in developing countries, (we) know that helping people to set up and run a business is only half the job,” Christina Chang, lead economist for CAFOD, the Catholic aid agency for Britain and Wales, said in an e-mail to IPS. “Without a conducive regulatory environment, the odds are stacked against their success and many may never even get off the ground.”

CAFOD has actively pointed to problems with scoring on the report.

“Some indicators are linked with a drive to lower labour standards and corporate taxation rates,” the agency states. “These are not ideas that other publications of the Bank endorse, and they should not be in their most influential publication.”

Yet the panel’s recommendations, some groups contend, now offer a potent opportunity.

“The panel’s report is a defining moment for World Bank policy to reflect the needs of working people, and a balanced approach to labour market regulation,” Sharan Burrow, general-secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said Monday in a statement. “If adopted, the World Bank has the opportunity to reshape the relationship between working people, business and governments.”