Abstract

The Ease of Doing Business (EDB) is one of the standard tools for quantifying the impact of regulations on economic activities. It acts as a kind of "cholesterol test" for nationwide economies and seems to be used to determine the requisites of borrowing countries. The paper discusses that the EDB computation is too simplistic and might be misleading. It aims at proposing a non-linear statistical data modelling to classify business regulatory systems and magnify differences. Moreover, the paper intends to investigate the association between business regulatory systems on one side and, respectively, GDP levels and growth rates, on the other. Results seem to support the intuition that differences in countries' regulatory environment might be significantly determined by the public policy goal of stimulating or sustaining economic growth.