Survey Methodology
The Enterprise Surveys capture business perceptions on the biggest obstacles to enterprise growth, the relative importance of various constraints to increasing employment and productivity, and the effects of a country’s business environment on its international competitiveness.The current instruments and manuals are available here:
- screener
- manufacturing
- services
- global (other manufacturing and services, other industries)
- sampling note
- questionnaire note
- implementation note
Since country surveys differ, data from differing survey instruments have been matched to a subset of an older standard instrument for dissemination on the website. The full standardized data sets, both for individual countries or as an aggregated data set, and the unstandardized country data, including country specific questions, are available to researchers.
Who conducts the surveys:
Private contractors conduct the Enterprise Surveys on behalf of the World Bank. Confidentiality of the data is necessary to ensure the greatest degree of participation, integrity and confidence in the quality of the data. For this reason, we use private contractors rather than any government agency, or any organization or other institution associated with government, to collect the data. Surveys are usually carried out in cooperation with business organizations and government agencies promoting job creation and economic growth, but confidentiality is never compromised.
Who is surveyed:
The survey is completed by managing directors, accountants, human resource managers and other company staff. At the heart of the enterprise survey is the core survey, which is integrated into a manufacturing and a services-sector survey. Some surveys are extended to include specialized modules (human resources & training, tourism, for example) customized to the country’s needs.
Structure of the surveys:
The core survey is organized into two parts. The first part seeks managers' opinions on the main constraints in the business environment. The second part focuses on productivity measures and is often completed with help from the chief accountant or human resource manager.
The Enterprise Surveys sample from the universe of registered businesses and follow a stratified random sampling methodology. A small number of sectoral sub-samples are included to provide measures of productivity that can be compared to the same sectors in other countries. Because the distribution of establishments in most countries is overwhelmingly populated by small and medium enterprises, surveys generally over-sample large establishments. Sample sizes for recent enterprise surveys range from 250-1500 businesses.
Sampling and weights
Enterprise Surveys used either simple random sampling or random stratified sampling. In a simple random sample, all members of the population have the same probability of being selected and no weighting of the observations is necessary. In a stratified random sample, all population units are grouped within homogeneous groups and simple random samples are selected within each group. This method allows computing estimates for each of the strata with a specified level of precision while population estimates can also be estimated by properly weighting individual observations. Weights take care of the varying probabilities of selection across different strata. Under certain conditions, estimates' precision under stratified random sampling will be higher than under simple random sampling (lower standard errors may result from the estimation procedure).
Twenty seven surveys for Europe and Central Asia (using the Business Environment and Enterprise Productivity Survey instrument (BEEPS)) are random samples. The 2006 Latin American and African surveys (except Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde and Ethiopia) and Jordan, and the 2007 surveys for Bangladesh and Ghana have weights for the estimates of the aggregate indicators in order to account for the random stratified sample design.