Doing Business Worldwide - World Bank Project

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MARCH 24, 2010

Doing Business Worldwide - World Bank Project

When entrepreneurs are trying to expand their business vision and find new applications for their business acumen, they usually start thinking of going to other countries of the world besides those their business is in at the time being. Thus, they require a lot of information about how to start a business in new jurisdiction, and usually seek for some good resources. Here I would like to point to a very functional one – a project of World Bank - the Doing Business project. It was launched 8 years ago and looks at small and medium-size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle for many countries of the world. The first Doing Business report, published in 2003, covered 5 indicator sets in 133 economies. In 2010 it covers 10 indicator sets in 183 economies. The project has benefited from feedback from governments, academics, practitioners and reviewers. The initial goal remains: to provide an objective basis for understanding and improving the regulatory environment for business.
Doing Business provides a quantitative measure of regulations for starting a business, dealing with  construction permits, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting
investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business—as they apply to domestic small and medium-size enterprises. It encompasses 2 types of data. The first come from readings of laws and regulations. The second are time and motion indicators that measure the efficiency in achieving a regulatory goal (such as granting the legal identity of a business).
Seven years of Doing Business data have enabled a growing body of research on how performance on Doing Business indicators—and reforms relevant to those indicators—relate to desired social and economic outcomes. Some 405 articles have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and about 1,143 working papers are available through Google Scholar.

So, I strongly recommend to look into it and thoroughly analyze the data before going to any country.