REFORM is a universal medicine urged upon struggling economies by liberal institutions (even The Economist has been known to prescribe it on occasion). When a country has been messed up long enough, reform becomes “much needed”. Reform means many things, of course, from cutting budget deficits to improving education. But a big part of it concerns business regulation, which reflects how much a country encourages companies and how much microeconomic distortion there is to economic activity. Such regulation is also measurable across boundaries, so one country can be compared with another. So what does this year’s survey of global business regulation by the World Bank (“Doing Business 2014”) reveal about which countries most need “much needed reform”—and which might not?Italy and Greece are high on everyone’s list of places that need to change a lot, and the World Bank’s list confirms it. They come a lowly 65th and 72nd respectively, out of 189 countries. The same is true, more or less, of France (38th on the list) and Spain (52nd), two fellow euro-sufferers.Germany, on the other hand, might not be in such urgent need of change, to judge by this measure. It comes 21st on the World Bank’s list, immediately after the small Asian, Nordic and English-speaking countries that are always found at the top of the table. This puts Germany above such paragons of...
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