On the World Bank B‑READY 2025 Findings

Reseated Founding Secretariat

Statement RC/SEC/2026/2

On the World Bank B-READY 2025 Findings

I. Purpose

II. What the findings can tell owners

III. What Days to Open will add

IV. The forthcoming full edition

V. Reseated’s evidence base

VI. Conclusion

Source

1. World Bank, B-READY 2025 report. The report’s 101-economy coverage and summarized findings are cited above.¹

Notes and sources

1. The Secretariat issues this statement in response to the World Bank’s B-READY 2025 findings. The first edition covers 101 economies. Across those economies, the average level of business readiness is approximately 60 per cent. Public services scores are approximately 23 per cent below regulatory framework scores.^[1] These figures matter to owners because a rule is not experienced only as a written requirement. It is also experienced through the procedures, information and public services needed to comply with that requirement and conduct ordinary business. ↩

2. Reseated welcomes comparative evidence that brings attention to both rules and their practical administration. The reported gap is a signal for further examination, not a finding that every government service is deficient, or that every business encounters the same obstacles. The results cover many different national settings. They are useful as a broad point of comparison; they do not by themselves tell an owner how long a particular permit will take, why an application is delayed, or what remedy is available in a specific jurisdiction.

3. The Red Tape Council’s Days to Open survey is intended to add a complementary view. It will focus on the practical experience of opening a business and navigating associated administrative steps. The survey is not a substitute for B-READY, nor is it intended to reproduce the World Bank’s assessment. It will help bring the perspective of owners into discussion of what readiness means in practice.

4. The difference between regulatory framework scores and public services scores draws attention to an important distinction. A framework can set out requirements, rights and procedures. A public service is where a person may need to find the relevant information, submit materials, obtain a decision or complete a required step. When those experiences do not align, a rule that appears clear on paper may still be difficult to follow in practice.

5. For a small-business owner, administrative friction can consume time that would otherwise be spent serving customers, managing staff, arranging supplies or keeping accounts. A process may be hard to plan around if its steps are unclear, if information is difficult to locate, or if the owner cannot determine when a decision will be made. These are practical consequences to investigate, not consequences that can be attributed to the B-READY findings alone. The headline figures do not identify which particular process accounts for the gap.

6. The findings should therefore be read as a reason to ask more precise questions. Which procedures are most difficult to complete? Is the requirement itself unclear, or is guidance difficult to find? Can an applicant tell whether a submission is complete? Is there a published service time? Can the owner check the status of an application or learn what is required to resolve a delay? Questions of this kind connect general measures of readiness with the decisions and tasks that businesses actually face.

7. The figures also caution against treating the existence of a rule as proof that the rule is accessible or straightforward to use. Conversely, a comparatively lower public services score does not establish that every service in an economy performs poorly. Owners, officials, researchers and representative bodies should avoid drawing conclusions about a particular office, permit or business owner from an aggregate comparison that does not make that conclusion.

8. Nor should a single measure be taken as a complete account of the operating environment for small firms. Administrative procedures are one part of that environment. The B-READY figures provide a comparative prompt to look more closely at how rules are delivered and experienced. They do not replace evidence about individual processes, the circumstances in which owners encounter them, or the differences between places and types of business.

9. The Red Tape Council’s Days to Open survey will complement the broader comparative picture by collecting owner-centred evidence about the steps involved in getting a business open. It is intended to make the experience more concrete: what an owner needed to do, what information was available, where uncertainty arose, and how the process affected the time required to begin operating.

10. The survey’s value will depend on asking about experiences in a way that allows careful comparison without suggesting that every business or jurisdiction is alike. The Council will need to distinguish among different kinds of process and record the location and context relevant to each account. A report that an opening process took a certain length of time is not, on its own, an explanation of why it took that long. The evidence should preserve that distinction.

11. A useful account should identify, where the respondent can do so, the administrative step involved and the point at which time was spent or uncertainty arose. It should also make clear whether the account concerns the owner’s own experience, an estimate, or information recalled from another source. These distinctions help readers understand what is being reported and what the report can support.

12. The Council should treat the survey as an evidence-gathering instrument, not as a league table. A simple comparison of elapsed time could conceal differences in the task being measured, the applicant’s circumstances, or the stages counted. Where the survey presents comparisons, it should explain what has been compared and the limits of the comparison. Where the evidence is not sufficient to support a conclusion, that limitation should be stated plainly.

13. The survey should also be used to identify questions that warrant closer review, rather than to assign blame on the basis of an individual account. A reported delay may have more than one explanation. The purpose of collecting accounts is to establish patterns that can be examined alongside public information and other relevant evidence. It is not to infer wrongdoing by a named official, public body or company from an unverified report.

14. In this respect, Days to Open and B-READY can serve different but related purposes. B-READY provides a cross-economy reference point across 101 economies in its 2025 edition. The survey can help identify the kinds of practical experience that sit behind questions of public service performance, while remaining grounded in the experiences reported by owners. Neither source should be presented as answering every question the other raises.

15. The forthcoming full 164-economy edition will broaden the comparative base. Its publication will create an opportunity to revisit how the initial findings relate to a wider set of economies. It will not make every local process directly comparable, nor will wider coverage alone establish why businesses experience a procedure as difficult. Those questions still require attention to the process, the setting and the evidence available.

16. The Red Tape Council’s work is designed to sit alongside that wider edition. The Council can use its survey to offer a practical lens on opening a business while the World Bank’s work provides a broader comparative reference. The two forms of evidence should be considered together where their scope and definitions permit, and kept distinct where they do not.

17. This approach is consistent with the Council’s developing proposal for a Small Business Impact Standard. The proposal concerns clear impact consideration for new rules affecting businesses, accessible processes, published service times and a defined approach to permit decisions. The Council’s work remains at an early evidence stage. The Days to Open survey can help clarify which administrative experiences owners report and what questions a future standard should address; it should not be treated as proof that a proposed measure has been adopted or tested.

18. As of 3 March 2026, Reseated has 143 seated members in 40 countries. Members have filed 255 reports from 41 countries. The recorded reports by council are: Platform, 183; Cashflow, 59; Fair Play, 7; Red Tape, 5; and Trade, 1. These are Reseated’s internal figures for that date. They are not estimates of the prevalence of a problem among all small businesses, and they should not be combined with B-READY figures as if the two datasets measured the same thing.

19. The Red Tape Council has five reports recorded in this internal snapshot. That number is a starting point for the Council’s evidence work, not a basis for a claim about how common a particular administrative burden is. The Days to Open survey is intended to widen that evidence base and to make the questions asked of owners more directly relevant to the procedures involved in opening a business.

20. Reseated’s process is to receive reports, test whether a pattern is present, develop a draft response, consult publicly, and submit a measure to an Assembly ballot before seeking adoption by the institutions able to act on it. Each stage has a distinct purpose. Reports identify experience; pattern review tests whether accounts provide a sound basis for collective action; consultation allows wider scrutiny; and a ballot determines whether the Assembly adopts a proposal. The survey will inform that process; it does not replace it.

21. The B-READY 2025 findings make a useful distinction visible: the assessment of regulatory frameworks and the performance of public services are not interchangeable. The reported difference gives owners and policymakers a reason to examine how business-facing processes operate, without treating an aggregate result as a verdict on any one service or jurisdiction.

22. The Days to Open survey will complement the forthcoming full 164-economy edition by focusing on the practical experience of opening a business. Its contribution will depend on careful questions, transparent limits and evidence that can be examined rather than overstated. Reseated will use the survey to help describe what owners encounter and to inform the Red Tape Council’s continuing work on rules and public services that small businesses can understand and navigate.

Sources

1. World Bank, B-READY 2025 report