Does Accountability Make 'Doing Business' Easier?

Over the last twenty years, several countries have adopted and implemented a set of policy instruments to make public administration more accountable, in the context of new public management reforms. In this paper, we first introduce an original dataset of accountability instruments in European countries. Using qualitative comparative analysis we explore the different accountability recipes that condition the business environment. For the latter, we draw on measures from the Doing Business database. Previous research suggests a causal link between regulatory quality, ease of business and growth. We contribute to the literature theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we consider a set of policy instruments selected on the basis of an explicit theoretical rationale; the theory of firealarms. This is more focused than previous research based on catch-all concepts such as 'regulatory quality' – which are also normatively loaded concepts. Empirically, we explore combinations of these instruments leading to the outcome 'ease of business', showing that there are different paths to positive and negative values of the outcome. This challenges the conventional view that the path to the negative outcome is the mirror image of the path to the positive outcome. In the conclusions, we reflect on the patterns identified, their implications for wicked issues, and how our empirical findings may be extended to a new generation of studies.