Global economic score-carding is pervasive. Indices rank countries’ performance on diverse subjects: corruption, quality of life for expat employees, taxation levels, logistics performance, and more. Some rankings, however, choose more over-arching objectives, ‘ease of doing business’ or ‘economic competitiveness’, and purport to measure countries’ progress towards them against a set of specific factors. The factors left out can lead to perverse results, which in some cases appear to ignore and reward materially negative aspects of an economic environment such as intolerance and discrimination – as if either could ever be good for business.
For example, the World Bank, in its recently published Doing Business report, has for the ninth consecutive year named Singapore the best country in the world in which to do business. The report “provides objective measures of business regulations for local firms in 189 economies and selected cities at the subnational level,” according to the financial institution. Yet, on same day the Bank released its report, Singapore’s high court upheld the country’s law criminalizing same-sex relationships. Similarly, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) just-released Global Competiveness Report ranks Singapore as the 2nd most “competitive” economy in the world.
The conclusion? Singapore is a great place to do business – unless you happen to be gay. How can two such discordant events be reconciled? How can a country that criminalizes private consensual behavior between two adults also be a so-called ‘great place to do business’?
