# **I. Introduction**

Effective regulation serves as a backbone of a thriving private sector in any economy. Policy makers understand the importance of increasing their countries’ competitiveness, striving to achieve more advantageous positions in the global economy. Mass media is one of the factors that has a potential to influence some of the reform decisions. In some cases, mass media could even veer regulatory and public actions towards areas of much needed reforms. For example, inadequate business regulation that is heavily criticized in mass media can become hard to ignore.

Increased access to information from various media sources addresses the fundamental economic problem of information asymmetry. Media serves as a conduit of information among the public, businesses and policy makers. As a powerful channel of information, media usually shapes the context for political discourse and allows citizens and businesses to make better informed decisions. Also, mass media conveys public and private sectors’ sentiments to policy makers.

The media pays close attention to the World Bank’s research that analyzes effective policies, better regulations and economic growth. _Doing Business_ is a research project translated into annual publications which measure, analyze and compare regulatory practices that directly affect the private sector in 190 countries. The reports identify and acknowledge regulatory reforms that de facto affect the ease of _Doing Business_ in the analyzed countries.

Numerous countries have developed a momentum for launching reforms to improve their Ease of _Doing Business_ rankings. Largely motivated by the global coverage of the report in mass media, governments often strive to gain positive media coverage by addressing local regulatory shortcomings. The report has been subject to considerable media attention in the past decade. Over the years worldwide media coverage of _Doing Business_ has been increasing exponentially, reaching more than 1,800 media citations and close to 1.5 million website views in the first four months after the launch of the _Doing Business_ 2018 report. Overall, from 2004 to 2018, _Doing Business_ has been highlighted by countries’ local press more than 17,400 times.<sup>3</sup> Moreover, _Doing Business_ findings are widely discussed by international newspapers, including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Media research presented in this paper demonstrates that to date, the OECD high-income group has the highest media coverage of _Doing Business_ , followed by the East Asia and the Pacific region. Conversely, in the Middle East and North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa media give _Doing Business_ the least attention compared to the rest of the world. However, as demonstrated by our research, this tendency correlates with the media presence in the regions as well as with reform implementation efforts in the subsequent two years. At the same time, among all income groups, media across lower-middle income countries has the highest number of _Doing Business_ citations.

This paper aims to investigate to what extent (if at all) media impacts political decisions. A practical approach to test the relationship between mass media and political actions is through

> 3 Primary data collection on media coverage of _Doing Business_ has been done through the use of the Factiva database. Factiva is an online comprehensive database primarily designed to provide data to business communities, researchers and specialists, aggregating content from both private and public sources. It pulls data from more than 32,000 information sources, including newspapers, journals, magazines, television and radio transcripts. Factiva has an almost universal reach, allowing to filter data by local and international sources.

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