What does “doing business” really measure? Evidence from trade times

Alfinura Sharafeyeva and Ben Shepherd

Economics Letters, 2020, vol. 192, issue C

Abstract: The World Bank’s Doing Business project claims to provide “objective measures of business regulations in 190 economies”. In the trade literature, a key use of these data has been to show the impact of border delays on trade performance. We revisit previous results using a structural gravity model and panel data for 2005–2015. Although we confirm the original finding, we also show that trade times have a negative and statistically significant impact on services trade—even though services do not in reality experience border delays. The effect is due to an apparent mixing in the Doing Business data of aspects of a country’s institutional environment with information on trade times. Our results provide a caution for applied researchers, and policymakers using these data to track performance.

Keywords: International trade; Trade policy; Trade facilitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176520301555
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:192:y:2020:i:c:s0165176520301555

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109215

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().