12. Exam Traps — Discontinued, Renamed or Merged Reports
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This is the single highest-yield section in the book, because examiners specifically favour testing whether a candidate is reciting an old (memorised years ago, still "famous") fact without realising the underlying report has since died, been renamed, or been folded into something else.
| Old Name | Publisher | Status | What Replaced/Followed It | The Trap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ease of Doing Business | World Bank | Discontinued, September 2021 (data-manipulation scandal in the 2018/2020 editions, involving alleged pressure over China's, Saudi Arabia's, Azerbaijan's and the UAE's scores) | Business Ready (B-READY), a new methodology launched from 2024 | Answering "World Bank publishes the Ease of Doing Business rankings" in the present tense; India's famous 2014→2020 jump (142nd→63rd) is a historical fact only |
| Global Competitiveness Report | World Economic Forum | Discontinued after the 2019 edition (WEF suspended it during COVID-19 and never resumed the same ranking format) | WEF shifted toward thematic reports (e.g., resilience/recovery indices) rather than a single successor ranking | Confusing this with IMD's World Competitiveness Ranking, which is a different publisher and is still very much alive (India 41st, 2025) |
| Inclusive Development Index (IDI) | World Economic Forum | Quietly discontinued after the 2018 edition — WEF never issued a 2019 or later edition, and it is rarely announced as "discontinued" the way EoDB was, making it an easy silent trap | No direct WEF successor; some of its underlying "inclusive growth" concerns are now folded into broader WEF thematic reporting rather than a single ranked index | Assuming this WEF product is still current, or confusing it with the ITU's differently-abbreviated "ICT Development Index," which shares the exact same acronym (IDI) despite measuring something completely unrelated |
| ICT Development Index (IDI) | ITU | Discontinued as a standalone index in 2017 | Folded into broader ITU digital-development measurement work; no single successor "IDI rank" exists today | Citing an "IDI rank" for India as if it were a current, actively-published figure — and confusing this IDI with the WEF's differently-scoped Inclusive Development Index, which shares the same three-letter abbreviation |
| World Press Freedom Index — release timing | RSF | Not discontinued, but its release month shifted (historically released around 3 May, World Press Freedom Day; from 2025 it moved to a November release) | Same index, same publisher, new cadence | Assuming the index always drops in May — a recent-year exam may reference a November release |
| Human Development Report — occasional gap years | UNDP | Not discontinued, but HDR was not published in certain years (e.g., a gap around 2021 tied to COVID-era data disruption before resuming) | Same index resumed on a roughly annual basis | Assuming an unbroken year-by-year sequence when a year was in fact skipped |
| Global Wealth Report — publisher changeover | Formerly Credit Suisse; now UBS | Not discontinued — Credit Suisse's 2023 collapse and takeover by UBS meant the report continued under a new corporate parent rather than stopping | UBS Global Wealth Report, continuing the same broad methodology and time series | Naming "Credit Suisse" as the current publisher of the Global Wealth Report — correct historically, but superseded since 2023 |
| Good Governance Index (India) — release delay | DARPG | Not discontinued, but a planned follow-up edition (expected around 2023) was delayed/postponed rather than released on the usual cycle | A later edition is expected once the postponement is resolved | Assuming DARPG's Good Governance Index runs on as strict a fixed annual cycle as, say, the CPI or HDI |
| SAARC Summits | SAARC Secretariat | Not a report, but the grouping's own summit cycle has been suspended since 2016 | No formal successor; India has instead deepened BIMSTEC engagement as a partial alternative regional forum | Treating SAARC as an actively-functioning annual-summit body in current-affairs answers |
| Bribe Payers Index | Transparency International | Not formally announced as discontinued, but no new edition has been released in many years — a quiet lapse rather than a scandal-driven shutdown | No successor product from Transparency International; the organisation's flagship remains the CPI alone | Assuming Transparency International still actively ranks exporting countries on bribery risk the way it once did, alongside its still-very-active CPI |
The reasoning trick for this whole section: whenever a question names a report you recognise as "famous," pause and ask "is this one of the ones that stopped, moved, or changed publisher?" before answering — Ease of Doing Business and the Global Competitiveness Report are, between them, responsible for a disproportionate share of wrong answers in this topic area precisely because they were so widely quoted for over a decade before quietly disappearing, and the WEF's Inclusive Development Index shows the same trap can occur silently, with no scandal or announcement at all — a report can simply stop being issued.
Practice Recall. Before reading on: name the two most famous discontinued reports in this book, their publishers, and roughly when each stopped — then name one that was discontinued silently, with no public scandal, and explain why that makes it an especially dangerous trap.
Answer: Ease of Doing Business (World Bank, discontinued September 2021) and the Global Competitiveness Report (World Economic Forum, discontinued after the 2019 edition) are the two famous, publicly-flagged discontinuations. The WEF's own Inclusive Development Index was discontinued after 2018 with no announced scandal or fanfare, making it dangerous precisely because a student has no obvious cue (no scandal, no news cycle) prompting them to check whether the index is still current.