modest, incremental, reductions to policy barriers without quite dramatic changes in implementation can be effective in reducing policy uncertainty.

The _Doing Business_ project has attempted to identify obstacles to private sector firms’ growth by examining the _de jure_ regulatory environment that firms face. The existence of (reasonably) common indicators in both the _Doing Business_ (derived from an examination of the regulations) and Enterprise Surveys (from firm responses) allows a comparison of the _de jure_ notional policy mappings and reported _de facto_ policy actions.<sup>31</sup> Figure 5 shows the results for three indicators: time to get a construction permit (5a), days to start a business (5b), and time to import goods (5c). While there is not an exact correspondence of the respective concepts, there are nevertheless three striking points from these figures. One, there is almost no increase in the average enterprise survey reported days with respect to the _Doing Business_ days. Clearly deals are prevalent. Two, there is, as documented above, large firm specific variability in the reported days but, even the reported delays _de facto_ at the 95th percentile are far lower 31 E.g. The Enterprise Surveys ask the “average time to clear goods through customs”, while Doing Business covers all the steps from the paperwork to port-handling and customs to delivery of the imported goods. The Enterprise Surveys ask “the number of days to get a construction permit”, while Doing Business asks for all the days for all the procedures needed to comply with getting permission to construct a warehouse. It is possible that some of the gap between the ES and DB is due to additional procedures being covered in the DB than the ES. However, it is difficult to see how this could account for the lack of correlation of the variation in ES and the DB indicators across countries. We tested for the sensitivity using the time to import goods, subtracting off the time for inland transportation within the DB indicator. While the distribution shifted slightly to the left, there was little change in overall pattern.

Looking at the sub-indicators within each Doing Business indicator, there are some that are not just based on the interpretation of regulations on the books, e.g. inland transportion withing ‘trading across borders’. For these sub-indicators, the lawyer or accountant that is making the evaluation provides an estimate, assuming that no intermediaries (legitimate or not) are used and no additional payments or bribes are paid. The size of the gap between the two sources of data illustrates how costly it would be not to try to strike a deal – and that assuming no deals are made does not reflect what in fact firms do given how far below the 45 degree line most observations are.

Another difference in methodology between the two datasets that should be kept in mind is that DB has a precisely defined firm conducting the transaction, e.g. 50 employees, domestically owned private company. The ES are a sample of firms – both larger and smaller than 50 employees. It is possible that some of the variation within country in the ES is that the regulatory requirements themselves vary by firm 45