Women, Business and the Law 2025: Concept Note

Excerpt:  “The World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) is a global benchmarking project that provides comprehensive and comparable data on how laws, regulations, and policies affect women’s economic opportunities and private sector development in 190 economies. It is housed in the World Bank’s Development Economics Global Indicators Group (DECIG). Women, Business and the Law (WBL) data and research findings have been instrumental in informing policy dialogue on legal reform to drive global growth and productivity for more than 15 years. Introduced in 2010, the project has amassed a rigorous worldwide database and has produced ten reports, with data spanning more than 50 years, highlighting legal reforms affecting women’s economic participation from 1970 to the present. Initially focused on analyzing laws de jure ‘on the books’, the WBL report in 2024 expanded its scope to assess the de facto implementation of these laws in practice. It aims to do so by examining economies’ diverse policy and institutional frameworks in support of legal implementation and gauging experts’ perceptions on the extent of enforcement of laws. This evolution marks a significant step in understanding not only the existence of laws but their practical impact on women’s access to jobs and markets.”