Editor,

The World Bank Doing Business Report assesses a country’s business environment across 10 indicators and benchmarks this performance against 183 countries Worldwide.

In the 2010 report, Rwanda has been ranked 67th out of 183 countries from 143rd out of 181 countries in 2009 becoming the leading global reformer.

However, the reader will recall that Rwanda was ranked 139th out of 181 (not 143rd as mentioned above) in the Doing Business Report of 2009.

This same situation arose when after having been ranked 150th out of 178 countries in Doing Business 2008, it was changed to 148th in the 2009 publication.

There are two reasons to explain this discrepancy. First, there are a number of re-calculations done after the publication of the report due to changes (even minor ones) in methodology and secondly there is the effect of including more countries in the assessment over the years.

The latter would include assessing the business environment of the new country and benchmarking it against the countries already in the assessment.

As a result, a country could see changes in their ranks that are contrary to those published in the report. In the 2010 publication, Kosovo and Cyprus were added to the assessment.

Frank Twagira,
Coordinator, National Doing Business Taskforce,
Rwanda Development Board