While I can't say whether this is true on a larger scale, you may be interested to learn that Paul Kagame, the ruler of Rwanda, put together a team specifically for the purpose of maximizing his country's ranking on the World Bank's ease-of-doing-business index.
That's a great example. I just hope that at least the changes they made to maximize Rwanda's ranking on the ease-of-doing-business index were genuinely beneficial rather than merely cosmetic.