Documentation v0.3.0

World Bank Subnational Doing Business

Business regulation scores from the World Bank’s Subnational Doing Business surveys.

Granularity
City
Format
Parquet
Time resolution
Static
Module version
v0.3.0
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Coverage and granularity#

Only parent cities matched from a World Bank source city are included. Several source-city observations may map to one city.

400 of 9,849 parent cities · 2009–2022 · 412 rows across the package

  • City: 400 of 9,849 boundary IDs
  • ADM1: 0 of 387 boundary IDs
  • ADM2: 0 of 3,130 boundary IDs

Row key: id, version, alpha3, source_city, data_as_of

Examples in the City Explorer: New Delhi, Johannesburg, Mexico City.

Source: World Bank — Subnational Doing Business

Joining this data#

A Python example using GeoPandas and pandas. Replace the file paths with your local downloads. See boundary levels and join keys.

Python 
import geopandas as gpd
import pandas as pd

boundaries = gpd.read_file("parent.gpkg")
observations = pd.read_parquet("ddl-doing-business.parquet")

joined = boundaries.merge(
    observations, on="id", how="left", validate="one_to_many"
)
print(joined.head())

Methodology#

World Bank source cities are matched to UCDB polygons, then attached to the selected parent city.

Schema#

NameTypeUnitsDescription
idstring—City identifier.
versionstring—Boundary version used for this match.
alpha3string—ISO3 country code.
source_country_namestring—Country label in the World Bank source.
source_citystring—World Bank source-city label; several may map to one city.
source_regionstring—Region label in the World Bank source. May be null.
data_as_ofdate—Date associated with the source observation.
starting_business_overall_scorefloat64—World Bank overall score stored in the starting_business_overall_score source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
construction_permit_overall_score_20float64—World Bank overall score stored in the construction_permit_overall_score_20 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
construction_permit_overall_score_15float64—World Bank overall score stored in the construction_permit_overall_score_15 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
getting_electricity_overall_score_20float64—World Bank overall score stored in the getting_electricity_overall_score_20 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
getting_electricity_overall_score_15float64—World Bank overall score stored in the getting_electricity_overall_score_15 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
registering_property_overall_score_20float64—World Bank overall score stored in the registering_property_overall_score_20 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
registering_property_overall_score_15float64—World Bank overall score stored in the registering_property_overall_score_15 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
paying_taxes_overall_score_20float64—World Bank overall score stored in the paying_taxes_overall_score_20 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
paying_taxes_overall_score_16float64—World Bank overall score stored in the paying_taxes_overall_score_16 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
enforcing_contracts_overall_score_20float64—World Bank overall score stored in the enforcing_contracts_overall_score_20 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.
enforcing_contracts_overall_score_15float64—World Bank overall score stored in the enforcing_contracts_overall_score_15 source field. _xx suffixes indicate different World Bank methodologies. See Notes for more information. May be null.

Notes#

  • Some of the measures have suffixes such as _20, _16 or _15. These correspond to different iterations of the World Bank Score calculation methodology and thus should not be combined into one.
  • Several source cities may map to one city. The recommendation is to aggregate them at the city level as per the data need.
  • If a field is null, it means the score is unavailable for that observation in the source data.

Citation#

When using these data, cite Urban Growth Center and the original source below, where applicable.

Original source

Citation 
World Bank — Subnational Doing Business. https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038564/doing-business

View original source

Urban Growth Center

Citation 
Development Data Lab. (2026). Urban Growth Center. https://cities.devdatalab.org/