11 indicators provide quantitative measures of regulations for starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, employing workers, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency.

The Doing Business data are collected through annual surveys that are administered to more than 9,000 experts in 185 economies. Expert respondents are lawyers, architects, government officials or other professionals who deal directly with business regulatory processes for their clients on a daily basis.<sup>4</sup> The questionnaires that these experts receive are all based on a standardized case study that ensures the comparability of data across economies.<sup>5</sup> With this paper we are proposing new data that complement the existing Doing Business indicators. The new data were collected between January and June 2012 by adding questions to the questionnaires for 4 of the 11 indicators: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity and registering property. Respondents were asked to assess the ease with which information on incorporation fees, building permit fees, electricity connection tariffs and property registration fees can be accessed in their country.<sup>6</sup> The four regulatory areas were selected because of the monopolistic positions of the government agencies involved. The clients of company and property registries, building departments and distribution utilities cannot _“vote with their feet,”_ when they are provided with poor service as there is no competitor to turn to. Hence, they are left with only one option, which is to exercise their _“voice.”_ Our hypothesis is that the _“voice”_ option can be exercised more effectively, if clients can point to easily accessible information on binding regulatory standards. We are especially interested in the accessibility of fee schedules because fees are usually set and disseminated by implementing agencies and are not part of a national legislation. Accessibility of this type of regulatory information therefore speaks directly to the openness and transparency efforts of specific government agencies.

In the questionnaires for all four regulatory areas, respondents had to choose between the following options:

> 4 Doing Business samples experts rather than firms for two main reasons. The first pertains to the frequency with which firms engage in the transactions captured in the indicators, which is generally low. For instance, a firm goes through the process of starting a business once in its existence while an incorporation lawyer may do several dozen such transactions in a year. Therefore, the experts providing information to Doing Business are better suited for assessing the process of starting a business than individual firms. Second, most of the information gathered through the Doing Business questionnaires is of a legal nature which firms are unlikely to be fully familiar with. For instance, very few firms will know about all the many legal procedures involved in resolving a commercial dispute through the courts, even if they may actually have gone through the process themselves. In contrast, a litigation lawyer would have no difficulty accurately identifying all the necessary steps.

> 5 For more details on the Doing Business methodology please refer to http://www.doingbusiness.org/methodology.

> 6 The data including the relevant websites is published at http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/transparency.

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