The prospects for doing business in countries are also determined by the business confidence index. The purpose of the article is to model trends in indicators that determine the state of the business climate of countries, in particular, the period of influence of the consequences of COVID-19 is of scientific interest. The approach is based on the preliminary results of substantiating a set of indicators and applying the taxonomy method to substantiate an alternative indicator of the business climate, the advantage of which is its advanced nature. The most significant factors influencing the business climate index were identified, in particular, the annual GDP growth rate and the volume of retail sales. The similarity of the trends in the calculated and actual business climate index was obtained, the forecast values were calculated with an accuracy of 89.38%. And also, the obtained modeling results were developed by means of building and using neural networks with learning capabilities, which makes it possible to improve the quality and accuracy of the business climate index forecast up to 96.22%. It has been established that the consequences of the impact of COVID-19 are forecasting a decrease in the level of the country's business climate index in the 3rd quarter of 2020. The proposed approach to modeling the country's business climate is unified, easily applied to the macroeconomic data of various countries, demonstrates a high level of accuracy and quality of forecasting. The prospects for further research are modeling the business climate of the countries of the world in order to compare trends and levels, as well as their changes under the influence of quarantine restrictions.

The paper proposes an approach to modeling the business climate of the country, which is based on the principles of information transparency, and makes it possible to assess the development trends of the studied indicator in conditions of the COVID-19. This approach has been tested on the example of Ukraine. The results obtained make it possible to analyze the cyclical development of the country's economy with high accuracy and reliability even under quarantine restrictions.