World Bank denies reports on the practice of applying the so-called "Uzbekistan protocol"
22/09/2021 09:06
World Bank denies reports on the practice of applying the so-called "Uzbekistan protocol"
22/09/2021 09:06
Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) - The World Bank said that the members of the team responsible for the release of the Doing Business report, as well as those leading the World Bank’s activities in the Europe and Central Asia region, are not aware of the practice of using the so-called "Protocol of Uzbekistan".
Law Firm WilmerHale published an overview of the data inconsistency in Doing Business 2018 and Doing Business 2020.
The document briefly mentions the so-called “protocol of Uzbekistan”. The World Bank Country Office in Uzbekistan released the following statement on this issue today:
The bank said in a statement that the World Bank is supporting reforms undertaken in recent years in Uzbekistan to improve the business climate as part of the country’s broad and ambitious economic transformation towards an open market economy. These reforms include the liberalization of domestic and foreign trade, simplification of registration and licensing procedures for business entities, and the development of the tax system. They have resulted in changes in the business environment and public financial management.
In particular, in 2018-2019. there was a significant increase in the number of newly registered business entities and enterprises with the participation of foreign capital. Also, the volume of exports of fruits and vegetables increased, and the registration of new enterprises and persons paying income tax reached new record levels, the statement said.
“Regarding the World Bank’s past assessment of reforms in Uzbekistan, as noted in the WilmerHale report, the Doing Business team and World Bank leaders in the Europe and Central Asia region are not aware of the practice. the so-called “protocol of Uzbekistan,” the bank notes.
The WilmerHale report also does not provide evidence that such a "protocol" existed and that it had any impact on the operations of the World Bank, the WB said in a statement.
Previously it was reported that the World Bank will no longer release the legendary Doing Business report, which showed the ease of doing business in different countries. The report notes that World Bank staff artificially changed the performance of China, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan in the 2018 and 2020 rankings.
According to the law firm, one method of artificially changing the ratings of individual countries was the so-called Uzbekistan Protocol, an unspoken rule according to which the Doing Business project management could, at its sole discretion, ignore reforms in individual countries. For the first time, this approach was used when assessing the indicators of Uzbekistan in one of the ratings, hence the name.
It was reported that the "protocol" was invented personally by Dyankov. In 2019, Azerbaijan suffered from this: on the personal instructions of Dyankov, the authors of the report decided not to take into account three reforms, because of which the country lost several positions. The detectives could not figure out why Dyankov made such a decision.
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