It might be the most important bogeyman in enterprise—larger, maybe, than even taxes: We’re speaking, after all, about pink tape. The concept that burdensome and overly difficult authorities regulation is strangling progress is sort of as previous as commerce itself. However proper now the hue and cry from the enterprise group is louder than at nearly any time in current reminiscence.
Concern about regulation is hovering amongst executives. In a current survey by Deloitte, North American chief monetary officers named new, burdensome regulation because the No. 2 menace to their enterprise, behind solely the potential of a recession. When the Nationwide Federation of Impartial Enterprise, which represents 325,000 small U.S. firms, performed its quadrennial survey earlier this yr, its members recognized “unreasonable authorities rules” because the second-biggest menace, after rising well being care prices. And for a fourth yr in a row, the CEOs surveyed by the Enterprise Roundtable for its annual financial outlook cited regulation as the highest price strain going through their firms.
Pink tape has emerged as a significant speaking level within the presidential marketing campaign—with every candidate approaching the subject in attribute trend. Hillary Clinton has promised to be the “small-business President” and has wonkishly outlined plans to chop pink tape by streamlining the startup course of for entrepreneurs and increasing entry to credit score by means of group banks and credit score unions.
For be taught extra about pink tape, watch this Fortune video.
Donald Trump, in the meantime, has taken a extra shoot-from-the-hip strategy. The Republican nominee has vowed to roll again lots of the new rules enacted beneath President Obama, together with environmental requirements designed to handle local weather change. Trump’s marketing campaign has proposed a ten% total discount in rules. However the candidate himself has at occasions instructed a extra sweeping overhaul. On the identical day {that a} videotape from 2005 surfaced exhibiting Trump bragging about his aggressive sexual habits—a revelation that despatched his ballot numbers crashing—the nominee cavalierly informed a crowd at a city corridor in New Hampshire that he would remove nearly all of federal company rules if elected. “I might say 70% of rules can go,” Trump stated. “It’s simply stopping companies from rising.”
Pink tape is clearly a significant supply of friction—however is it actually strangling enterprise? The reply is much less apparent than it might appear. For a phenomenon that’s seemingly ever current, pink tape might be more durable to pinpoint than you may suppose. Weighing the prices of rules in opposition to their advantages just isn’t all the time an easy activity. How do you tweak your mannequin, for instance, to account for slowing down a global-warming Armageddon? Or absolutely account for the steadiness—and transparency—that hold your monetary markets wholesome?
Even economists who consider that the system is flawed have a tough time quantifying the problem. “I do suppose that our economic system loses resilience and adaptableness as a result of the regulatory construction is so inflexible,” says Michael Mandel, chief financial strategist on the center-left Progressive Coverage Institute and considered one of Washington’s prime thinkers on regulatory reform. “I might say that our sluggish progress is partly related with regulation. But it surely’s exhausting for me to place a quantity on it. And God is aware of I’ve tried.”
We will definitely intuit the drag of forms—within the more and more lengthy and costly means of creating new medicines, for example. And there are limitless examples of how, in isolation, pink tape seems to price us loads. Infrastructure initiatives that get delayed for years—with tens of hundreds of pages of environmental opinions and permits—leading to hundreds of thousands in additional prices.
The U.S. stays a pleasant market relative to most nations, however there are indicators of slippage. In its “Doing Enterprise 2016” report, which assesses economies across the globe by regulatory effectivity, the World Financial institution ranked the U.S. at No. 7, down from No. 4 5 years in the past. America got here in beneath Hong Kong and the UK (No. 5 and No. 6 respectively) however forward of Germany (No. 15).
In a much bigger sense, a rising variety of observers fear that our Twentieth-century regulatory system could also be unfit for an more and more complicated and fast-changing world. How can we make certain that our regulatory framework promotes innovation and fosters progress whereas on the similar time defending employees and shoppers? Can we repair the present system or do we have to begin over? And the way a lot is enterprise at fault for the very excesses that firms themselves bemoan? Heck, the place does pink tape even come from, and the way is it gumming up the works? And, lastly, is there something anyone can do to cease it?
Fortune got down to discover these questions and extra in current weeks—by means of dozens of interviews with CEOs, traders, researchers, lecturers, economists, and coverage specialists—and tried to not get tangled up within the course of.
First, we provide a really temporary historical past lesson: The phrase “pink tape” in English goes again a whole bunch of years. It initially referred to the pink ribbons that have been used to bind up vital authorized paperwork. By the point of Dickens, the time period had change into synonymous with the concept of bureaucratic waste and inertia. (Lesson over.)
How precisely will we outline pink tape at present? The idiom is ubiquitous, however the which means is mushy for most individuals. Not so for Barry Bozeman, the director of the Heart for Group Design and Analysis at Arizona State College and one of many tutorial world’s main specialists on the subject. He affords this definition: “guidelines, rules, and procedures which have a compliance burden however don’t obtain the practical goal of the rule.”
In Bozeman’s thoughts this results in an important distinction. “The primary drawback that individuals normally run into after they’re asking about pink tape is that they’re asking in regards to the incorrect factor,” says Bozeman, coauthor of an influential 2011 tutorial treatise known as Guidelines and Pink Tape. “As a result of pink tape and guidelines should not the identical factor. You possibly can have one rule and it may be nothing however horrible pink tape if it doesn’t accomplish a aim. Or you possibly can have a bunch of guidelines which might be extremely efficient, and none of them can be pink tape.”
Corporations are definitely greater than able to creating their very own bureaucracies, and do. However when enterprise leaders complain about pink tape, they’re nearly all the time griping about authorities rules.
Currently, a lot of that grumbling has been directed towards President Obama. There’s rising frustration within the enterprise group in regards to the quantity and impressive scope of recent federal rules being produced by his administration. Within the first installment of a six-part look again at his presidency, the New York Occasions, hardly a stalwart of conservatism, known as Obama “the Regulator in Chief” and asserted that he’ll go away workplace as “probably the most prolific authors of main rules in presidential historical past.”
The numbers bear that out. A complete of 560 main rules—these having an financial impression of $100 million or extra—have been revealed within the first seven years of the Obama administration, in accordance the George Washington College Regulatory Research Heart, in contrast with 494 for his predecessor, George W. Bush. And the variety of new guidelines handed usually spikes in a President’s closing yr in workplace.
Two main new sources of rules beneath Obama have been the landmark legal guidelines enacted in 2010: the Dodd-Frank invoice, an enormous response to the monetary disaster of 2008, and Obama’s signature Reasonably priced Care Act, the contentious regulation that introduced well being care to hundreds of thousands of uninsured People. (The regulation agency Davis Polk calculated final yr that the greater than 22,000 pages of rule releases associated to Dodd-Frank added as much as greater than 34 copies of Moby Dick.) However with Congress unable to cross a lot of something in recent times, the President has empowered his govt department to pursue coverage targets starting from the battle in opposition to local weather change to enhancing office security.
Ask Massive Enterprise whether or not these are guidelines or pink tape and also you’ll get a full-throated reply: “The CEOs of the Roundtable completely would say that one of many causes that GDP is limping alongside the place it’s, within the 1% or 2% vary, is the oppressive rules which were unrelenting prior to now a number of years,” says John Engler, a former Republican governor of Michigan and the president of the Enterprise Roundtable. “I simply suppose that individuals have nearly thrown up their arms. What we now have is an equal alternative offender right here, as a result of in just about each company one thing is occurring.”
To others, that form of complaining is par for the course from the enterprise group. “You possibly can return to essentially 100 years now of Rooster Little claims from enterprise about regulation,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, the nonprofit consumer-rights advocacy group based by Ralph Nader within the early Seventies. “Each time enterprise has stated, ‘The sky goes to fall,’ and amazingly it by no means does.” He cites a litany of examples—from the primary guidelines to remove little one labor by means of the New Deal to the start of contemporary environmental regulation within the Seventies and as much as the adoption of smoke-free eating places and bars.
Obama took workplace vowing to chop pink tape fairly than add to it. He put in his buddy Cass Sunstein, a regulation professor and an creator, because the administrator of the Workplace of Info and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a division of the Workplace of Administration and Price range tasked with assessing the validity of recent rules issued by cupboard companies. Throughout his tenure from 2009 by means of 2012, Sunstein instituted a program of “retrospective overview” to look at present rules for effectiveness. However regardless of a lot fanfare, a comparatively small portion of guidelines have confronted scrutiny beneath the method. In the meantime, the rulemaking machine has continued apace.
In that means, Obama continued an extended custom of Presidents trying—and largely failing—to manage proliferation of rules. Jimmy Carter, for example, signed the Paperwork Discount Act into regulation in 1980, creating OIRA. A yr later, Ronald Reagan signed an govt order compelling cost-benefit evaluation of all main rules. Invoice Clinton constructed on that in 1993 when he issued govt order 12866, which required each “important regulatory motion” be submitted to OIRA for overview. George W. Bush then added new necessities for overview together with his personal govt order in 2007. And nonetheless, inevitably, the overall quantity of guidelines has continued to extend.
Dr. Cynthia Deyling believes in regulation. Because the chief high quality officer for the Cleveland Clinic, a world-renowned nonprofit hospital system, it’s her job to maintain the medical group’s services—together with its outposts in Florida, Nevada, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates—in compliance with the handfuls of regulators that monitor its operations. Regulation, she says, “makes our group higher.” That stated, she has to cope with an unlimited quantity of pink tape—and it’s rising on a regular basis.
The previous 10 years have seen a really important enhance in rules for hospitals, says Deyling, and in the identical interval the foundations have change into far more prescriptive and survey based mostly. For a hospital to obtain cost from Medicare or Medicaid, it should, amongst different issues, be compliant with a variety of circumstances set forth by the Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Companies, or CMS. Beforehand employees members had extra discretion in exercising skilled judgment. That’s been changed, she says, with checklists and audits.
This strategy has contributed to rising prices. Whereas most hospitals used to have one skilled to take a look at threat administration, the Cleveland Clinic now has 90 full-time staff at its completely different services who oversee “regulatory survey readiness.” Final yr the Cleveland Clinic was subjected to 320 survey days. The hospital pays $15.5 million yearly in labor and consultants to assist its employees drill for the inspections. The hospital is topic to regulators together with OSHA, the EPA, the Nuclear Regulatory Fee, the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, and the Cuyahoga County meals inspector. It’s not unusual, says Deyling, for a nongovernmental company to do a survey on behalf of CMS, after which for the Medicare and Medicaid company to conduct a validation survey, solely to get a special end result.
Higher alignment between state companies and the federal authorities would save the hospital time, cash, and energy. “Regulation is vital and advantages sufferers,” says Dr. Anthony Warmuth, the Cleveland Clinic’s enterprise high quality administrator. “It’s simply when it goes exterior the norms that appear constructive—or when it’s contradictory to different guidelines on the market—that it creates a variety of tail chasing and it will get very complicated for us to do the best factor and comply.”
More often than not, regulation begins with a noble aim. Legal guidelines are usually handed with the intention of addressing or stopping some incorrect, and guidelines are developed to implement these legal guidelines. In that means, as Herbert Kaufman famous in his seminal 1977 ebook, Pink Tape: Its Origins, Makes use of & Abuses, “one individual’s pink tape could also be one other’s treasured procedural safeguard.” It’s while you add up all these guidelines that you just get into bother at occasions.
Examine 4 industries the place expertise is racing forward of regulation right here.
Mandel of the Progressive Coverage Institute has launched a metaphor—one which was usually repeated to me by others—to explain the consequences of regulatory accumulation. It’s like throwing pebbles in a stream, the economist says. Toss one in, and even two or three, and there’s no apparent impact. However when you throw in 100 you could begin to block the circulation of water. “It’s actually about taking levels of freedom away from companies,” he says.
That is compounded by the truth that the rulemaking equipment—similar to the law-making system—is geared towards pushing out new rules, not eradicating them. And as soon as new guidelines are on the books, they normally simply keep there. Mandel factors out that there isn’t a central place within the federal authorities the place you possibly can report issues with rules. And since there’s no database of complaints, there’s no strategy to analyze the patterns and establish overlaps that want addressing.
“I form of consider the regulatory problem as folks principally saying in their very own various methods, ‘Who’s in cost right here?’ ” says Mandel. “Is there anyone who’s actually steering the ship? If you happen to level out to anyone that there’s an issue, is there anyone that may reply?”
Enterprise leaders complain in regards to the specter of recent, onerous rules. However when pressed, executives usually have a tough time arising with present guidelines they want to have repealed. Partly, that’s as a result of huge firms are fast to regulate, and rules which might be in place change into a barrier to entry for opponents.
Certainly, authorities intervention is usually a welcome safety at occasions. Dash CEO Marcelo Claure praises the Obama administration for serving to his firm negotiate cheap roaming charges with Verizon and AT&T in areas the place Dash doesn’t have cell towers, and says that customers have been the winners. “On this case we welcome regulation that doesn’t permit Verizon and AT&T to make use of their market energy to principally drive us out of enterprise,” Claure informed Fortune in September.
Giant will increase in federal regulation usually are available in response to upheaval. The Securities and Alternate Fee, in addition to a lot of the trendy framework for contemporary monetary regulation, was created in response to the Crash of 1929. The social and environmental awakening of the Sixties led to a want to guard our planet, shoppers, and employees, and to an awesome growth of the regulatory state within the Seventies. (And that growth, in flip, begat the Washington lobbying mega-complex.)
The assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, then prompted the creation of the Division of Homeland Safety, which, with a fiscal 2016 finances of $27 billion, now accounts for 43% of the federal government’s spending on rules.
Likewise, the passage of Dodd-Frank—which created a robust new company known as the Shopper Federal Safety Bureau—was a direct response to the Nice Recession. At 849 pages, it was a mammoth and impressive statute, designed to rein in huge banks and compel them to keep up larger ranges of capital. Core to the laws was the Volcker Rule, which sought to rebuild the wall between conventional and funding banks that had been erected in 1933 with the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act and torn down with its repeal in 1999.
The monetary business has bristled on the regulatory burden of Dodd-Frank since its passage. There’s little question it has added important prices to the operations of massive banks. In his annual letter to shareholders earlier this yr, for example, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon reported that since 2011 the variety of staff devoted to regulatory “controls” on the financial institution had risen from 24,000 to 43,000 and the yearly price related to that compliance effort had jumped from $6 billion to $9 billion. After all, any compliance bills pale compared to the price of the monetary disaster, which economists on the Dallas Fed calculated conservatively just a few years in the past to have been wherever from $6 trillion to $14 trillion.
However whether or not all of the added regulatory burden of Dodd-Frank actually retains us safer from the subsequent monetary meltdown is open to debate.
The regulation isn’t simply an exemplar of regulatory kudzu, nevertheless. It’s additionally a case examine in how Massive Enterprise—and large lobbying—performs a job in creating its personal pink tape. Think about the Volcker Rule, which was instituted to stop banks from utilizing prospects’ cash for proprietary buying and selling. The unique draft of the rule was very brief, factors out Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Higher Markets. The ultimate regulation ended up being 950 pages.
“Now, why is that?” asks Kelleher, a former Skadden Arps legal professional who was chief counsel for Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) throughout the monetary disaster. “Primarily due to the monetary business. The business lobbied over and time and again for this exception, that exception, this clarification, this interpretation, this permitted exercise. Virtually the entire size in these guidelines are demanded by the business—after which they complain in regards to the size and complexity of the rule.”
It’s a phenomenon that Lee Drutman has seen repeatedly. A senior fellow on the nonpartisan suppose tank New America and the creator of The Enterprise of America Is Lobbying, Drutman says that difficult rules present cowl for the powers that be. “When you get a profit, you pay a lobbyist to maintain that profit,” says Drutman. “That’s why it’s so exhausting to simplify something.”
Even the method of churning out the foundations themselves is turning into tougher. In June, Public Citizen revealed a report known as Unsafe Delays that discovered the time it takes to finish a rule has risen sharply over the previous few years. Economically important guidelines accomplished within the first half of 2016, the nonprofit’s analysis discovered, took a mean of three.8 years, or 58% longer than the historic common. In different phrases, there’s a document quantity of pink tape in making the pink tape. “You’re principally speaking about a whole presidential time period to get a rule by means of,” says Public Citizen CEO Weissman, “which makes it fairly exhausting to manage this stuff.”
The friction within the system solely provides to the left-right divide on options. The place conservatives see a bloated regulatory state that has run amok, progressives understand a damaged system that has been hijacked by company pursuits who form and delay rules as a lot as doable.
“It’s form of bizarre,” says Sam Batkins, the director of regulator coverage on the center-right non-profit American Motion Discussion board. “You’ll go to a gathering on regulation from the best and also you’ll hear a few damaged course of. And also you go to a regulatory assembly on the left and also you additionally hear a few problematic course of. So in that sense there’s some unanimity.”
Philip Ok. Howard has spent greater than 20 years waging a marketing campaign in opposition to pink tape. However regardless of a marked lack of progress, it doesn’t happen to Howard, 68, to desert his campaign. “I used to be speaking to anyone about this the opposite day. Folks ask me, ‘Why are you beating your head in opposition to the wall?’ ” he says, and pauses. “It’s a great query.”
A affluent New York Metropolis legal professional who at present is senior counsel on the white-shoe agency of Covington and Burling, Howard grew to become alerted to the dysfunction of contemporary authorities within the early Nineties by means of his volunteer work in civic affairs. Since then he has written 4 books assailing over-legalization and based a nonprofit, nonpartisan group known as Widespread Good to advocate reform—enlisting in his initiatives retired politicians from each the left and the best, together with former senators Invoice Bradley and Alan Simpson and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Howard has appeared on The Every day Present, given a TED speak that has gotten greater than half-a-million views, been a particular adviser to the SEC on regulatory reform, and labored with Al Gore on his “reinventing authorities” undertaking.
Howard’s perception is that our legal guidelines have gotten too exact for such a posh world and that our makes an attempt to dictate each side of human habits by means of rulemaking are solely bogging us down. The system, he argues, is unadaptable. Much like Mandel, Howard believes that too many various authorities implies that no person is in cost.
Lately Howard has targeted a lot of his power on proposing methods to hurry up the method of rebuilding America’s decrepit infrastructure. To take action, he believes, we have to radically rethink our allowing system. One in all Howard’s favourite case research is the continuing undertaking to lift the Bayonne Bridge to permit at present’s larger container ships into Newark Harbor in New Jersey. The plan had minimal environmental impression as a result of it used the identical proper of means because the previous construction and the prevailing foundations. But the approval course of took greater than 4 years and generated hundreds of pages of experiences, together with a survey of all close by historic buildings, including massively to the invoice for taxpayers.
Howard has floated a three-page legislative proposal that he believes may lower the common allow time for main initiatives down from a decade or extra to at least one or two years. His huge concept is to empower the chair of the Council on Environmental High quality. That official, who experiences to the President, would be capable of resolve when a undertaking has had sufficient ample overview and provides it the inexperienced gentle. “Proper now, nobody has that accountability,” says Howard, “so opinions change into 20,000 pages when they need to most likely be 50.”
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Washington has already addressed the problem of infrastructure delays—in a really Washington means. In December 2015, President Obama signed into regulation the Fixing America’s Floor Transportation Act, or FAST Act, which can create a brand new federal company, a unit of the Transportation Division known as the Nationwide Floor Transportation and Revolutionary Finance Bureau. The DOT’s current “mile markers” report on the FAST Act doesn’t present that any funding initiatives have been completed but, nevertheless it does checklist 69 new rules, memoranda, and pointers paperwork which were issued. “It’s like one thing out of Gilbert and Sullivan,” says Howard.
In Howard’s thoughts, it’s time to go to a clear sheet of paper and rethink our complete strategy. He appears to be like to the examples of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and Napoleon, who rewrote the legal guidelines after they grew to become too convoluted. “You possibly can’t reform this technique,” says Howard. “It’s important to rewrite it. That’s the lesson of historical past.”
Certainly, in some ways the problem of pink tape appears extra pressing than ever. It’s not simply the sheer mass of it or the price of it—it’s due to the transformative period wherein we dwell. The tempo of technological change is extra fast than ever, it appears, as new enterprise fashions, platforms, and purposes flood {the marketplace}.
We’re within the midst of a brand new Industrial Revolution that can be pushed by applied sciences resembling genetic engineering and drones—and that may drive us round in autonomous autos. The concern is that lawmakers and regulators, in making an attempt to maintain up with these fast-moving adjustments, will do one thing to sluggish them down.
The Progressive Coverage Institute’s Mandel worries about pink tape stifling innovation in ways in which we don’t even see. For example, he affords arguably the most important client expertise breakthrough of the previous decade—the smartphone. Mandel factors out that when Apple partnered with AT&T to deliver out the primary iPhone in 2007, the businesses have been capable of negotiate their unique deal for the uniquely data-heavy iPhone, together with a limiteless knowledge plan, with out regulators wanting over their shoulders. “Suppose that you just’d needed to have hearings? And the way lengthy it might have taken, and what number of objections would there have been?” asks Mandel, exploring the hypothetical. “How a lot progress would have been misplaced by that?”
Corporations at the forefront of this revolution have struggled at occasions to adapt to the entrenched regulatory state. Trip-hailing large Uber raced forward and constructed a world model whereas alternately ignoring and battling regulators in lots of markets, with combative CEO Travis Kalanick main the struggle. Earlier this yr the startup signaled that it was able to take a special tack, forming a coverage board that features Ray LaHood, a former head of the Division of Transportation, to work with authorities on its regulatory challenges.
The truth that Uber has already secured a valuation of greater than $60 billion from its enterprise capital traders might show that an improvised strategy can work in the best circumstances. But it surely’s too haphazard to construct a method round. What firms really want is a means out of this morass.
Matt Harris is a managing director at Bain Capital Ventures who invests primarily in fintech, the rising sector of startups which might be utilizing expertise to disrupt the monetary business. “If I may change one factor, it might simply be, give me one regulator,” says Harris. He factors out {that a} funds firm at present must cope with 50 states, completely different components of the Treasury Division, the FDIC, the Fed, and the Division of Justice if it plans to do something worldwide. In all, says Harris, there is likely to be near 80 completely different regulators watching over your enterprise.
He acknowledges that the exercise of shifting cash round must be fastidiously scrutinized. “However the notion that it’s best to have 75 constituencies, all of whom on any given day can shut you down—it’s simply massively inefficient,” he says.
Having a single regulator with such sweeping authority will not be fairly sensible in an economic system as different and sophisticated as ours, nevertheless. What we actually want is a brand new framework for excited about regulation itself, not the regulators.
Mandel says the present system of retrospective overview hasn’t made an impression. Together with Diana Carew, a colleague of his at PPI, he has proposed the formation of a Regulatory Enchancment Fee that may be licensed by Congress for a hard and fast interval to establish rules that needs to be eradicated or modified to encourage innovation. A model of the proposal has been launched within the Senate and Home prior to now couple of years, however has but to realize traction.
Harris echoes Philip Ok. Howard in suggesting that we might have a extra radical strategy. One of the simplest ways to answer our more and more complicated world is to make our guidelines easier, he suggests, no more detailed. Laws at the moment are written in an try to legislate each possible motion by people on each possible topic—an unimaginable activity. “I believe the entire thing must be rethought and boiled again to extra of a principles-based set of detailed prescriptions on how the whole lot can work,” says Harris. “Issues might fall by means of the cracks at occasions, however the strategy we now have now’s getting creakier and creakier.”
Paradoxically, the very concept of pink tape is likely to be on a collision course with the forces of disruption. The expertise business has set its sights on forms, simply because it has so many different hidebound, change-resistant industries earlier than it.
As a working example, IBM (IBM) agreed in late September to purchase consulting agency Promontory Monetary Group, which focuses on monetary regulation. The concept is to marry Promontory’s experience with the AI energy of IBM’s Watson and develop smarter compliance techniques.
David Kenny, who runs IBM’s Watson enterprise, sees alternatives for comparable investments in the whole lot from FDA compliance to site visitors guidelines for autonomous autos. “There’s such a regulatory burden on firms at present,” says Kenny. “All this well-meaning pink tape can get in the way in which of progress. So if we will automate the pink tape, make it clear, and assist the policymaker and the oldsters that must implement it higher perceive one another, boy, that actually frees up a variety of capability.”
In any case, people haven’t been capable of remove pink tape. We would as nicely let the computer systems have a attempt.
A model of this text seems within the Nov. 1, 2016 problem of Fortune with the headline “Pink Tape.”
This story has been up to date. An earlier model said incorrectly that China ranked No. 5 within the World Financial institution’s “Doing Enterprise 2016” report. In reality, Hong Kong ranked No. 5 and China ranked No. 84.
