Doing (Don't Do) Business

One of my favorite Turkish constructs is the "me/ma" suffix, which could mean "ing" or "don't." So "i? yapma" would be the Turkish for the World Bank's annual Doing Business report. It could also translate as "don't do business."

In all fairness, you could not say that for Turkey from the latest version of the report, which measures how difficult it is to open and run a small- to medium-size business when complying with regulations. While it fell four spots to 55th in this year's rankings, it was ranked 71st in 2012. And as Martin Raiser, the Bank's country director for Turkey, noted last year, Turkey's score is "largely as expected for an upper middle-income country."

Besides, the country has made dealing with construction permits, one of the 10 areas the report measures, easier, with the remaining nine staying broadly unchanged. Turkey's fall in the rankings is because of other countries' improvements rather than its own backpedalling. In fact, almost half of the G-20, including other emerging markets like Brazil, China and South Africa, fell as well.

Moreover, a recent paper found virtually no correlation between the Doing Business findings and those from the Bank's enterprise surveys, which are based on interviews rather than laws and regulations. For example, the actual time companies tell surveyors they spend on obtaining construction permits or operating licenses turns out to be "much, much less" than the times reported in Doing Business.

I am sure this result would not surprise Turkish businessmen, who are used to getting around regulations by loopholes or paying off officials. In that sense, the gap between the two surveys could be a proxy for the degree of corruption and/or uncertainty businesses are facing with respect...