Civil Society Rejects the World Bank’s 2015 Doing Business Rankings

Contact:
Anuradha Mittal, 510-469-5228, amittal@oaklandinstitute.org

(Oakland, CA): Some 260 civil society organizations from around the world have joined forces to send a resounding rejection to the World Bank’s 2015 Doing Business report, which is to be released on October 29.

Since 2002, the Bank’s Doing Business project has been benchmarking and ranking countries on the ease of doing business. It rewards lowering social and environmental safeguards to facilitate foreign investments, thereby allowing the exploitation of natural resources and human capital by foreign corporations and local elites. Upheld as the flagship project by the World Bank, Doing Business has guided other benchmarking projects, including the 2013 Benchmarking the Business of Agriculture (BBA), developed at the G8’s urging.

“This race to the bottom, cheered on by the Doing Business metrics, has forced countries to adopt an economic and regulatory environment that favors big agribusinesses and foreign corporations. How the Bank usurped the authority to rank nations--dictating national policies in sovereign nations, which are most harmful to the working poor, the indigenous, pastoralists, and smallholder farmers--remains a puzzle. After years of devastating impacts caused by these rankings, international civil society is rejecting the 2015 report and denounces the Doing Business Rankings as an illegitimate practice for which the Bank has no mandate nor authority,” said Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute.

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