Nicita, Antonio; Benedettini, Simona --- "Towards the Economics of Comparative Law: The Doing Business Debate" [2012] ELECD 591; in Monateri, Giuseppe Pier (ed), "Methods of Comparative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Methods of Comparative Law

Editor(s): Monateri, Giuseppe Pier

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802529

Section: Chapter 15

Section Title: Towards the Economics of Comparative Law: The Doing Business Debate

Author(s): Nicita, Antonio; Benedettini, Simona

Number of pages: 15

Extract:

15. Towards the economics of comparative law:
the Doing Business debate
Antonio Nicita and Simona Benedettini



1. INTRODUCTION
The centrality of institutional determinants for economic performance has recently
flourished in the economic policy debate. This is testified, among other things by several
initiatives launched either by intergovernmental organizations or foundations, focused on
measuring the impact of the institutional framework on growth or competitiveness. The
Doing Business report published annually by the World Bank is just one of the prominent
examples in this respect. Recent debates over global financial crises have further renewed
the role of institutional settings and legal standards as `genetic' features of well-
performing markets, which is now acknowledged even by one of the Chicago School's
most eminent scholars.
The idea that designing appropriate institutional frameworks should be the new frontier
of policy-making in the hands of governments (La Porta et al., 1999, 2008) is now central
in comparative law and economics studies. Structural reforms are, indeed, the new horizon
of most governments both in developing/transition countries and in the most advanced. To
assign a quantity measure to the quality of institutions is crucial in policy evaluation
analysis. On the one hand, indeed, to express institutional entities through quantitative
values is essential in order for an empirical evaluation of institutions to be feasible; on the
other, an ambiguous measuring might lead to wrong normative recommendations.
Policymakers increasingly refer to `quality' as a useful benchmark against which to
evaluate institutions. While `quality' sounds like a sufficiently ...