WBG Pioneer - Regulatory Efficiency and Subnational Business Environment Assessments

Background/Organizational Context

The Regulatory Efficiency Unit (DECRE) in the Development Economics Vice Presidency supports data-driven diagnostics of business regulatory environments and public service delivery. The unit's subnational business environment work adapts the Business Ready (B-READY) methodology to city, regional, and country-specific contexts to identify regulatory implementation gaps, benchmark good practices, and generate actionable evidence for policy reform, private sector development, job creation, and inclusive growth. This internship will support DECRE's core pipeline of Subnational B-READY and related business environment assessments, including legal and regulatory research, expert-based data collection, data validation, and preparation of analytical outputs for client-facing and knowledge products.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Conduct desk research and legal/regulatory analysis on selected business environment topics, including business entry, business location, utility services, international trade, taxation, dispute resolution, market competition, and business insolvency.
• Support preparation, customization, administration, tracking, and quality checks of expert questionnaires and data collection instruments for subnational assessments.

Assist with identifying relevant private sector experts, public sector counterparts, and institutional sources, and maintain organized trackers for outreach, responses, and follow-up.

• Help code, clean, compare, and validate questionnaire responses against laws, regulations, public websites, administrative data, and other secondary evidence.

Support process mapping and preparation of short analytical notes, tables, charts, presentations, and background inputs for reports, briefings, blogs, and dissemination materials.

• Provide operational and research support to task teams, including meeting notes, source organization, document management, and other project needs under tight deadlines.