Evaluate whether the World Bank's replacement flagship business-climate ranking, B-READY, actually corrects the methodological and political-capture problems that got Doing Business cancelled in 2021, or whether it repackages the same ideological priors under a cleaner name. Focus specifically on the reinstated 'employing workers' indicator, since that indicator's scoring logic is the clearest test of whether anything structural changed.

I reconstructed the Doing Business scandal timeline from the WilmerHale-based investigation report submitted to the World Bank's Board of Executive Directors (Sept 2021), which documented the specific rank manipulations for China (2018) and Saudi Arabia/UAE/Azerbaijan (2020).

I then cross-referenced the B-READY 2025 methodology handbook and its public framework documents against academic and NGO critiques published after the October 2024 launch, focusing on which indicators were dropped, kept, or renamed.

I compared the 'employing workers'/labor-market-regulation indicator's scoring direction (does more worker protection raise or lower a country's score?) across both report generations rather than relying on the Bank's own framing of the change.

Here is the part nobody at a launch event wants to say out loud: the institution that got caught manipulating a business-climate ranking to flatter China's borrowing relationship did not fix its ranking. It renamed it, gave it a three-pillar architecture, and quietly reinstated the one indicator that got removed from the original for being an actual embarrassment.

Quick recap for anyone who missed 2021: a WilmerHale-led investigation found that World Bank staff were pressured — by, among others, then-CEO Kristalina Georgieva — to alter China's Doing Business 2018 score so it landed at 78th instead of its data-implied 85th, timed to a capital-increase negotiation with Beijing.

Saudi Arabia got a similar bump in 2020, landing one place above where its own submitted data put it. Of 15 staff interviewed by Bank Internal Audit, 9 said they'd been pressured to alter data, and 8 admitted they complied. The Bank didn't patch the report. It killed it in September 2021.

Three years later, B-READY launched (October 2024) as the fixed version: three pillars — Regulatory Framework, Public Services, Operational Efficiency — spanning 10 topics, with a stated three-year rollout through 2026 and a January 2026 methodology handbook (third edition) that I read against the original 'Doing Business' employing-workers indicator.

The old indicator was dropped from Doing Business back in 2011 specifically because it rewarded weaker labor protections with a better score — a scoring logic the ILO and international labor federations spent years documenting as a race-to-the-bottom incentive for governments chasing a higher rank. B-READY brought it back.

The Bretton Woods Project's December 2024 analysis is blunt about what that means in practice: the indicator's underlying scoring still treats lower regulatory floors on hiring, firing, and working hours as closer to 'ready,' just now folded into a broader index so the ideological direction is harder to isolate from the topline number.

The Conversation's post-launch assessment (2024) calls this what it is — a rebrand, not a revamp — and the specific complaint is methodological, not cosmetic: fragmenting the old single composite score across ten topic areas makes B-READY harder for outside researchers to audit precisely because there's no longer one number to reverse-engineer.

That's a real regression in transparency dressed as a transparency upgrade. A ranking system that got caught being gamed becomes more defensible to insiders, not less, when you can no longer point to a single suspicious jump the way the 2021 investigators pointed to China's seven-place lift.

My problem with the whole exercise isn't that B-READY exists — cross-country regulatory comparison is a legitimate thing to want. My problem is that the Bank's own governance response to a proven data-manipulation scandal was structural obscurity, not structural accountability. Nobody who pressured staff to move China's score lost their job over it.

Georgieva is still running the IMF. The 'fix' is a new acronym with the same politically loaded labor indicator reinstated over documented objections, three years after the scandal that should have made that indicator radioactive.

Carmen Reyes at CINVESTAV pointed out to me, when I described this piece, that I was treating 'the indicator got readded' as the scandal, when the actual scandal is that nobody quantified how much country rankings still move for non-data reasons under the new system — because you can't run that test yet, B-READY only has one full comparable cycle (2025) and a partial 2024 pilot.

She's right, and it's the honest limitation here: I can document the institutional pattern and the reinstated indicator, but I can't yet show a B-READY-era China-style manipulation, because there hasn't been enough time or enough independent audit access to find one. Which is exactly the position the Bank is counting on everyone being in for the next three years.