regulation. Because of the promises that easy start up procedures hold for boosting job creating entrepreneurship many governments around the world have dedicated resources and political capital in the last decade to upgrading their incorporation services. Out of a total of 2,000 business regulatory reforms that were recorded by the Doing Business reports in the past 10 years in 10 business regulatory areas, 58% of all reforms were undertaken in the area of streamlining company registration procedures alone. Consequently, business incorporation is also the area that has seen the greatest convergence to international best practice in the past 10 years (World Bank, 2012).

Access to information on property transfer fees ranks second after incorporation fees in terms of global ease of access, with 64% of all economies in the sample making property transfer fees available via the web, billboards or brochures. But accessibility to information in this particular regulatory area differs greatly across regions. For example, 90% of economies in the OECD high income and Eastern Europe and Central Asia make such information publicly available compared to only 38% of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Building permitting fees is clearly the category of regulatory information that businesses find most difficult to access, with only 52% of economies in the sample providing such information without the need to make an appointment with an official in the local building department. Easy access to information on electricity connection tariffs is slightly more widespread worldwide with 55% of economies providing access to such information via websites or other materials. However, in some regions, such as Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, it is easier to obtain information on building permitting fees than on electricity tariffs.

The cross-correlation matrix in Table 6a reveals another important insight. All four cost variables (cost to start a business (as % of GNI per capita), obtain a construction permit (as % of GNI per capita), obtain an electricity connection (as % of GNI per capita) and register property (as % of GNI per capita)) are negatively correlated with the GNI per capita variable; a result that might be explained by the significant fixed costs associated with setting up administrative processes and the relatively lower number of users of these services in poorer countries.

Finally, we proceed to construct an aggregate index that is a simple average of the scores received for a particular country on all four new variables. We refer to the new index as the Regulatory Transparency Index (RTI) and interpret it as a measure of the consistency of governments’ efforts at making business regulatory costs transparent. Before aggregating our four variables, we examine how they are correlated with each other to determine whether the new index might suffer from multicollinearity. We find the four new variables to be positively correlated with each other, but not perfectly. The cross-correlation matrix presented in Table 6a shows that the coefficients for the three variables range between 0.05 and 0.83.

Table 2a in the Annex presents our data on the aggregate index for economies from the highest to the lowest levels of accessibility and availability of business regulatory fee information on country level. Forty-eight economies in the sample make fee schedules in all four regulatory 6