The World Bank will not release its annual report ranking business competitiveness by country amid concerns of improperly altered data about four countries: China, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Journal notes the "Doing Business" report is the "premier international ranking of the business environment in different countries" and governments have been motivated by it to make improvements to their regulatory environments in an attempt to gain a higher position on the list.

"The publication of the Doing Business report will be paused as we conduct our assessment," the bank said in a statement, according to Reuters, adding it found "a number of irregularities" in data changes found in reports published in 2017 and 2019, though it did not offer any specifics.

"The changes in the data were inconsistent with the Doing Business methodology," the bank said, promising to "correct the data of countries that were most affected by the irregularities."

The report previously encountered controversy after Paul Romer, at the time the World Bank's chief economist, said he thought that methodological changes in the report could have been biased toward the then-president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet. Romer ended up resigning due to the controversy over his remarks.

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