The Financial Times quoted accurately the following sentence from an internal email that I wrote: “Imagine a field of science in which people publish research papers with data that are obviously fabricated. …”Some readers mistakenly assumed that this sentence was supposed to convey a hidden meaning. To be clear, I am not aware of a single instance in which someone at the Bank published fabricated data, most certainly not “obviously fabricated” data.

In a conversation with a reporter, I made comments about the Doing Business report that gave the impression that I suspected political manipulation or bias. This was not what I meant to say or thought I said. I have not seen any sign of manipulation of the numbers published in Doing Business report or in any other Bank report. What I did want to say is something many of us in the Bank believe–that we could do a better job of explaining what our numbers mean.

As a follow up to the story in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), I’ve been delving into the details of the calculations behind the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings for Chile. I thought it would be helpful to illustrate what the rankings would be under an unchanging measure of the business climate. To be specific, what I decided in advance was to pick all of the underlying variables for Doing Business indicators that are available for all 5 years, DB 2014-2018.

Because it is New Year’s Eve, I indulged in some Twitter. One exchange might be worth unscrambling from some others. Dani Rodrik triggered it with a post that offered this advice to non-economists: Do not let math scare you; economists use math not because they are smart, but because they are not smart enough. Lukas Freund responded on Twitter: Agree on many points, which in classic Rodrik-fashion are pithy but insightful.

Someone from at the World Bank wrote to ask what I thought about the Nobel Prize for Dick Thaler. Here’s my reply: I think it’s terrific that Dick got the prize. He deserves lots of credit for pushing forward the research agenda of behavior economics, and doing so with good cheer, despite the disdain it provoked from many quarters. He lead the wave of work that followed the pioneering basic scientific insights of Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky and their many colleagues from psychology.