Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
The Business Ready Project: the World Bank, the ILO, and Labour Law’s Future in Global Policy
Chair(s): Deirdre McCann (University of Durham, United Kingdom)
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
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.
A Forensic Look at the B-Ready Index: How Definitions, Weights and Aggregates Skew Country Outcomes and Rankings
Simon Deakin, Kamelia Pourkermani University of Cambridge UK
In this paper we take a close look at the methodology used to construct the B-Ready Index. In contrast to its predecessor, the Doing Business Report’s Employing Workers Index, the B-Ready Labour Index (or ‘Topic’) purports to capture the benefits to business of labour regulation (‘social benefit’) as well as the extent to which labour laws impose duties and obligations on employers (‘firm flexibility’). However, the Labour Topic scoring methodology is systematically skewed in favour of the deregulatory ‘firm flexibility’ indicators over the protective ‘social benefit’ ones. We explain how this is the result of the cumulative effect of the way that the Labour Topic indicators are firstly defined, then weighted, and finally aggregated to produce the overall country scores and then the rankings which depend on them. We consider the implications of our analysis for evaluation of the B-Ready index, both as an instrument of labour law policy, and as a data source.
The ILO and the World Bank: Reflections on a Dynamic Relationship
Sukti Dasgupta International Labour Office
The ILO and the World Bank: reflections on a dynamic relationship
