The finance minister introduces the “Doing Business” ranking, which is meant to show how easy it is to do business in a given country. She explains the standard used by the rankings: how difficult it is for a hypothetical business to comply with regulations and pay taxes. She then states that her country's government has simplified tax filing for small and midsized businesses since the last ranking, and concludes that therefore, her country's ranking will probably improve.

The finance minister's first premise is the standard used by the rankings: the World Bank looks at how difficult it is for a hypothetical business to pay taxes and comply with regulations. Her next premise is what has changed in her country since the last rankings: her country has made it easier for small and midsized businesses to pay taxes. By concluding that her country's ranking will improve, the finance minister assumes that the second premise is actually relevant to the first one — that making it easier for small and midsized businesses to pay taxes counts as an improvement by the standard of the World Bank's rankings.

But notice that the rankings look at how easy it is for a "hypothetical business" to pay taxes and comply with regulations. We don't know how big that hypothetical business is, but the finance minister specifically tells us only about small and midsized businesses. If the World Bank's hypothetical business is a large business, then the changes the finance minister tells us about are completely irrelevant to her country's ranking. So to evaluate this argument, it would be useful to know the size of the hypothetical business the World Bank looks at.

Another point to notice is that, even if the World Bank's hypothetical business is small or midsized, the rankings don't just look at how easy it is to pay taxes. They also look at how easy it is to comply with regulations. So just knowing that it's easier for businesses to pay taxes wouldn't necessarily mean the finance minister's country had actually improved by the World Bank's standard, if other regulations had become more complicated in the meantime. To evaluate this argument, it would be useful to know if there were other changes to regulations that might balance out the changes to taxes, so we could assess the net effect of all the changes on the rankings.

One last point to notice is that the finance minister compares her country to itself at the time of the last rankings, while the rankings evaluate different countries compared to one another. Because a country's place in the rankings depends on how it compares to other countries in terms of ease of doing business, we can't reach a conclusion about the ranking of the finance minister's country without knowing anything about other countries. Even if the finance minister's country has made improvements to its policies, it's possible all the other countries in the world have made even more improvements, and so the finance minister's country could even go down in the rankings, despite the changes. Information about any changes in other countries' business-related policies would be useful in evaluating this argument.