The relationship between law and economic development remains enigmatic. Broadly speaking, there is no doubt that legal mechanisms for social control (or ‘institutions’, to use North's words) play a major role. Nevertheless, the impact of legal organization on economic development has not been clearly identified. Despite the progress attained by major studies in recent years, they have not definitively resolved whether law is a condition precedent to economic development, or rather a supporting element thereof, much less whether a particular legal system is necessarily and universally optimal. The failure of collectivization is evident. However, the open market model has multiple variants of the state's role and the degrees of regulation. A first approximation challenging the relevance of economic analysis of this topic notes the frequent confusion between legal system, legal rule, administrative and bureaucratic organization, political system, substantive law, and legal practice. The confusion produces uncertainty about the purpose of the evaluation. The Doing Business reports aspire to measure the ease of doing business in a country, within its legal framework. However, contrary to the oft-advanced idea, this approach involves an assessment, not of the legal system within its functional organization but rather of public policies and their implementation. In this regard, hasty conclusions recognizing a correlation between the ease of doing business and membership in a particular legal family are of dubious validity. Evaluating legal systems per se requires an assessment of the proper applicability of rules that fall within the corpus of the law, the predictability of legal solutions and the substantive guarantee of the rights recognized by legal rules. This approach perforce raises the question of legal certainty. The establishment of an index of legal certainty will contribute to an analysis of this characteristic, which is an essential attribute of the law in various national systems and at various stages of the development of norms and their implementation. This study provides rationales for a legal certainty index.
