World Bank. The World Bank, through their Doing Business project (www.doingbusiness.org), ranks nearly 200 economies on the ease of doing business. One of their rankings measures the ease of starting a business and is made up (in part) of the following variables: number of required start up procedures, average start up time (in days), and average start up cost (in % of per capita income).

The following table gives the mean and standard deviations of these variables for 95 economies.

Procedures (#) Time (Days) Cost (%)
Mean 7.9 27.9 14.2 SD 2.9 19.6 12.9 Here are the data for three countries.

Procedures Time Cost Spain 10 47 15.1 Guatemala 11 26 47.3 Fiji 8 46 25.3

a) Use z-scores to combine the three measures.

b) Which country has the best environment after combining the three measures? Be careful—a lower rank indicates a better environment to start up a business.