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Process Reforms: Enabling decision-making under uncertainty 181

Table 2: Comparison of regulatory standards and regulatory enforcement in 2020

Rank US UK Singapore Canada Brazil Russia China South India
Africa
Regulatory Enforcement 20 13 3 11 60 73 67 45 74
Government regulations 20 11 5 12 62 47 63 92 104
are effectively enforced

Government regulations
are applied and enforced 16 9 4 8 64 83 63 59 107
without improper influence
Administrative
proceedings are conducted 33 13 1 17 124 24 23 48 89
without unreasonable delay
Due process is respected in 18 12 7 5 55 97 98 25 45
administrative proceedings
Source: World Justice Project (2020)

6.5 The same conclusion can be derived from various World Bank studies. Its Regulatory
Quality Index shows that despite improvement in India’s regulatory quality since 2013
2
(Figure 1), it is still much lower than UK, US, Singapore, Japan etc. (Figure 2). Similarly,
the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) report (2020) shows that despite making
huge strides in the overall EoDB rank, India still lags behind in the sub-categories ‘Starting a
business’ and ‘Registering Property’ where the country’s rank is 136 and 154 respectively. The
report points out that this is due to the high number of procedures required to legally start and
formally operate a company as well as the time and cost consumed to complete each procedure.

Figure 1: Regulatory Quality Figure 2: Cross country comparison
in India of regulatory quality (as of 2019)

50 100
90
80
45 70
Percentile rank 40 Percentile rank 50
60
40
30
20
35
0
30 10 UK US India

25 Singapore Canada South Africa Brazil China Russia
1996 2000 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 2019

Source: World Bank (2019)
Note: In Figure 1 and 2, higher number indicates improvement (unlike in other rankings)

2 Regulatory Quality captures perceptions of the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound poli-
cies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development. Estimate gives the country’s score on the
aggregate indicator, in units of a standard normal distribution, i.e. ranging from approximately -2.5 to 2.5. This is
a part of Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) of World Bank.