Barbados will be among the first set of countries to be included in the new World Bank report – Business Ready – which will replace the flawed Doing Business report that was scrapped after last being published in 2019.
Former Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler, who is currently the Alternate Executive Director at the World Bank Group for Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean, made the disclosure on Tuesday night as he delivered the Small Business Association’s (SBAs) 8th Leo Leacock Memorial Lecture, held at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination at the University of the West Indies (UWI).
“Within each indicator, B-Ready will include data on three component considerations of the modern economy – digital adaptation, environmental sustainability and gender participation,” Sinckler said.
“So I have to tell you that the two countries up first [are] Barbados and Jamaica, in 2024, followed in 2025 by Antigua, Canada, and Grenada, and then the third edition in 2026, The Bahamas, Belize and Guyana. That is our constituents. So the report is coming,” said Sinckler.
The pilot series is to cover an initial group of 54 states in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Sinckler, who took up his role with the World Bank in May last year, said in addition to greater consideration for the role of the public service, the report will have more balanced coverage of different aspects of the business environment, including new data sourcing and complement from expert consultations.
“They are going to go to Governments, private sector, civil society; they are going to do a whole lot of consultations. All topics will be structured under three pillars – regulatory framework, public services and efficiency – and the scoring will be based on firm flexibility and social benefits,” he said.
“So they are including social benefits now which weren’t in the previous report. So they are going to be assessing indicators such as business entry, location, utility services, labour, financial services, international trade, taxation, dispute resolution, market competition, business insolvency and so forth.”
This followed an internal audit and independent probe that found a number of irregularities and alleged favouritism toward some economies.
Sinckler, who served as Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs in Barbados between 2010 and 2018 under the Fruendel Stuart administration, admitted that he had major challenges with the previous report.
“One of the major challenges I had with the report was how the data was being collected and who was being positioned [to speak] because nobody knew,” he said, recalling that in one of the reports, that data differed greatly from what was obtained at one government department.
He also said he had an issue with the comparative methodologies used in the old report, explaining that using a weighting system that compared Barbados and other small developing states to larger countries like the United States that had greater staff complement and technical experts was simply not fair.
“So I had my difficulties with it . . . . But the long and short is that a review was done and there were found to be significant flaws in the ways they went about doing this Doing Business report,” he said.
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