There is a growing interest in the availability of metrics that allow countries to register, compare, and evaluate the regulatory quality of public administration, and its impact on labor productivity, entrepreneurship and innovation. Inspired by the work of Slovakia's Institute of Economic and Social Studies, the Atlas Network’s Center for Latin America initiated a project in 2020 to identify the reach and the cost of bureaucratic compliance for the private sector in conducting business in selected countries in Latin America. As a result, The Index of Bureaucracy (IB) was published in 2021 and produced comparable statistics for doing business in six Latin American countries. Specifically, the IB sought to quantify the “time-tax” and regulatory burden on small and medium business enterprises while also making recommendations for streamlining processes that were imposing very high transaction costs on small businesses.

From this initial work, the IB gained traction and recognition from think tanks, heads of state, business leaders, and leading academics in the region. Its attention to differences within the region, focus on small businesses, consideration of two types of bureaucratic processes - those opening and business and those keeping a business operational - and gathering information from the field positioned IB as a reputable informational tool for business and investment.

Since inception, the IB has systematically increased the number of countries under analysis from the initial 6 to 19 in 2024. Now with the sound methodology already tested and in place, this phase of the project led by Sary Levy-Carciente of The Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at Florida International University will further build out the index to include up to 25 countries, so that it can systematically assess the time and financial costs associated with bureaucratic processes for small and medium enterprises (SME) across Latin America. In addition, the project will also investigate how these costs impact SMEs innovation and what processes can be streamlined to enhance business efficiency.