This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 27th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How hard is it to do business in America's largest cities?

The new Doing Business North America Project aims to collect data on more than 100 American

cities to help figure out what makes good city policy.

Stephen Slavinsky runs the project at the Center for the

study of Economic Liberty at Arizona State. We spoke last month in Colorado Springs.

Years ago the World Bank put out the doing business index for countries around the world

and I don't know if they're still doing it or not that good and one of the things that jumped out at me was like these weird

statistics that they tracked unlike how hard is it to close a business how hard

is it to open a business, that one makes more sense, and in a lot of countries

you have these like zombie companies that aren't allowed to go out of business.

They have these massive assets that are just declining in value every day.

They can't get rid of them.

You've taken that idea and done it in the United States.

So what does the projects look like generally and what kind of useful information

are actionable information are people going to get out of it.

Sure.

But doing business North America project is a project that we're doing in Arizona State University

at our center for the study of economic liberty and it was basically inspired by that World Bank study.

They've been doing it for about a dozen years.

They take what they see as the biggest business city

...