World Bank Doing Business Project and the statistical methods based on ranks: the paradox of the time indicator

The Doing Business (DB) Project of the World Bank has a large impact on media, policy makers and private sector and could have a significant influence on future policies implementation. For these reasons it would be important to better evaluate the rank criteria and avoid the choice of indicators that would possibly alter the nature of the empirical cases. After presenting the general principles of the percentile rank, we focus on the DB criteria for assigning the score to the time indicator. The paradox emerged from the analysis stresses the need of an empirical counterproof in order to avoid significant biases of the nature and the order of the considered phenomenon