The World Bank Group on Thursday announced that it will discontinue its ‘Doing Business’ reports, an annual flagship report that the international financial institution has been publishing since 2002.
The statement from the group comes after a probe of data irregularities allegedly due to pressure by some top bank officials to boost China's ranking in 2017.
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The financial institution remains firmly committed to advancing the role of the private sector in development and providing support to governments to design the regulatory environment that supports this, World Bank said..
An explosive report to the Bank’s Board of Executive Directors, Investigation of Data Irregularities in Doing Business 2018 and Doing Business 2020, revealed how senior Bank officials applied pressure to manipulate data in order to improve rankings for select countries. The irregularities in Doing Business reports had affected four countries: China; Saudi Arabia; United Arab Emirates; and Azerbaijan as per the report.
China had a score of 65.3 with a global ranking of 78, similar to the previous year’s. After the corrections in data for indicators like Starting a Business, Getting Credit, and Paying Taxes indicators, China’s score fell to 64.5 and global ranking to 85.