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Parallel Session 5.6: Special Session on World Bank's Business Ready Project
Time:
Thursday, 03/July/2025:
11:00am - 12:30pm
Session Chair: Deirdre McCann
Location:Auditorium (Cinema Room) (R2 south)
Presentations
The Business Ready Project: the World Bank, the ILO, and Labour Law’s Future in Global Policy
Business Ready (B-READY) (2024-) marks the World Bank’s return to the quantification and comparison of labour laws in the wake of its discredited Doing Business project (World Bank 2024). Grounded in a set of indicators that purport to measure and compare the business environments of countries across the world, B-READY is a new and significant driver of the international and domestic debates on labour regulation. The project has restored Labor as a fully-integrated component and the Bank intends to use the index to advocate for domestic reforms – “showing how and by how much each economy lags in international good practice” (World Bank 2024a, p xxii) – while simultaneously discouraging “a ‘race to the bottom’ or simplistic solutions that were the unintended by-product of Doing Business” (ibid, Foreword, p xi)).
The RDW Network emerged from research efforts to respond to Doing Business. Network members had forcefully criticised the conceptual and methodological foundations of the Doing Business project (Berg and Cazes 2008, Lee and McCann 2008, Lee, McCann and Torm 2008, Deakin 2011) and RDW was founded on the conviction that interdisciplinary and international research is vital to properly understand the impacts of labour law regimes (Lee and McCann 2011).
This Special Session, then, is an opportunity for RDW2025 to host the first interdisciplinary research/policy dialogue on Business Ready. The panellists are key policy-makers –from the ILO’s Employment Policy and Conditions of Work and Equality Departments and Bureau for Workers’ Activities - and leading labour law scholars whose work has tracked the World Bank’s engagement with labour regulation and both evaluated and designed labour law indices. The Session responds to the Call for Abstracts’ observation that Business Ready “is sparking renewed concerns about the risks of quantification and comparison of labour law”. The Session also advances the Conference’s broader focus on the effectiveness of labour rights and on political barriers to labour law reform in developing countries. The Session will reflect upon the significance, limitations and future of the Business Ready project, including its likely effects on the ILO, the domestic implementation of ILSs, and policy discourses on effective labour regulation.
Presentations of the Special Session
B-Ready: The Labor Topic, ILO Standards and The Role and Impact of Labour Regulation
Deirdre McCann1, Sangheon Lee2 1Durham University, 2International Labour Office
This paper assesses B-READY’s Labor index and the 2024 country-scoring through a comparison with the ILO’s International Labour Standards (ILSs). Drawing on the Business Ready 2024 report (World Bank 2024a) and the project’s Methodology Handbook (World Bank 2024b), we raise conceptual and methodological questions about the B-READY indices. As critics of Doing Business, we return to B-Ready with a particular interest in comparing these two projects’ labour indices (on Doing Business, see Lee and McCann 2008; Lee McCann and Torm 2008; McCann 2015, 2019). The paper compares the B-READY indicators with the ILSs – with a particular focus on ‘non-core’ standards – to explore how the Bank conceptualises labour regulations and purports to measure their impacts. The paper then examines the 2024 country-scoring to consider how the project’s conceptual and methodological assumptions shape its assessment of domestic labour law regimes, including through a comparison with the authors’ Effective Regulation Index.
The Methodology of the B-Ready Labour Index
Simon Deakin, Kamelia Pourkermani University of Cambridge UK
We take a granular look at the methodology used in the B-Ready scoring of labour regulation. In principle, the B-Ready index follows generally understood norms of index construction. On closer inspection, the index works to produce outcomes which are not a simple function of construct validity considerations. The way in which indicators are defined, aggregated and weighted skews outcomes to favour labour market flexibility (‘firm flexibility’) over social protection (‘social benefit’) in the country scores and rankings. The methodological choices which generate this effect are not clearly justified in the B-Ready documentation so far published. Concerns over the opacity and lack of neutrality of B-Ready’s predecessor, the World Bank’s Employing Workers Index, are likely to resurface as the B-Ready methodology is rolled out.
Discussants
Sukti Dasgupta, Michael Watt International Labour Office
The ILO and the World Bank: Reflections on a Dynamic Relationship
