The Doing Business in 2005: Removing Obstacles to Growth report, co-sponsored by the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank Group, estimates that an improvement from the bottom to the top quartile of countries in the ease of doing business is associated with an additional 2.2 percentage points in annual economic growth. An indication of the payoff comes from Turkey and France, each of which saw new business registration increase by 18 percent after the governments reduced the time and cost of starting a business last year. Slovakia's reform of collateral regulation helped increase the flow of bank loans to the private sector by 10 percent.

On average, it takes a business in a rich nation six procedures, 8 percent of income per capita, and 27 days to get started; in a poor or lower-middle-income economy, the same process takes 11 procedures, 122 percent of income per capita, and 59 days. In more than a dozen poor countries, registering a new business takes more than 100 days. Potential investors in many rich nations enjoy full access to the ownership and financial information of publicly listed companies while investors in most developing countries have hardly any access. Data can be easily obtained online for 145 countries; this should serve as an example:

The Economist digs a little bit deeper and writes ($):

In Burkina Faso, for instance, night and weekend work are forbidden, and the minimum wage is 82% of the average value-added per worker. To sack someone, an employer must first re-train him, place him in another job and pay him a lump sum equivalent to 18 months' wages. This is one reason why more than 90% of Burkinabes are still peasants. In such an arid and infertile country, this is not much fun.

Rules aimed at protecting vulnerable groups, such as women, often do the opposite. In Turkey, women who marry are allowed a year to decide whether to quit their jobs. If they go, their employers must give them a large severance package. So firms hire men: only 16% of Turkish women have formal jobs.

Poor countries may have lots of rules that “protect” workers, but they tend to lack credible systems for protecting property rights. Using the unhurried courts in Guatemala, for example, it takes on average 1,459 days to force a debtor to pay up, compared with 48 days in the Netherlands. In 12 countries, it would cost more to recoup a typical debt than was originally owed. Guess how easy it is to borrow money in such places. On a variety of measures, the report reckons that people and firms in poor countries enjoy only half as much protection of their property rights as those in rich countries.