Economics

The Enterprise Surveys are conducted by the World Bank and its partners across all geographic regions and cover small, medium, and large companies. Uniform universe, uniform methodology of implementation, and a core questionnaire are the basis of the Global methodology under which most Enterprise Surveys have been implemented since 2006. The Enterprise Surveys collect a wide array of qualitative and quantitative information through face to face interviews with firm managers and owners regarding the business environment in their countries and the productivity of their firms.

The topics covered in Enterprise Surveys include:

• infrastructure
• trade 
• finance 
• regulations 
• taxes and business licensing 
• corruption 
• crime and informality 
• finance 
• innovation 
• labor 
• perceptions about obstacles to doing business

Go to https://www.enterprisesurveys.org/. Find the data portal, it should be one of the blue links on the enterprise survey homepage and click the link.  

This will take you to the data portal. It should say “Full Survey Data” in big letters. To the right of the screen is the login portal. Underneath it should be a blue link to click that says “new account”. Click the link.

Fill out your information using your Dartmouth email. Assign Dartmouth College to your primary institution affiliation. Include as much information as possible in your “one paragraph summary of your research project”. Submit your account request by pressing “Sign Up”. You will immediately receive an email about activating your account. Activate your account immediately. Your account request submission will not be processed until you activate your account. It can take up to two business days to receive account approval after activating your account.

Within two days, you’ll receive your access approval for the survey portal via email. Proceed to the login link https://login.enterprisesurveys.org.   

There are two documents under here: the first is the code book which lists all of the questions asked in the surveys, the second is a PDF which is a manual on how to best interpret and analyze the questions and their answers. Last is the indicator data, it outlines how each indicator was constructed. Not necessary for analysis but if you're curious about the survey process, very informative. 

Country data vs standardized data

“Country data includes all questions that were asked in a survey but may lack comparability across countries and years. Standardized data is country data that has been matched to a standard set of questions. This format allows cross-country comparisons and analysis but sacrifices those country-specific survey questions which cannot be matched. The standardization process requires that certain compromises are made in order to match some of the variables. Thus, we encourage our users to pay close attention to the actual wording of the survey questions and to use the raw country datasets for their analysis.”

Panel Data

“Panel data is survey data for the same firm over multiple years. For example, a business in Brazil was interviewed in an Enterprise Survey conducted in 2003 and it was also interviewed in the Enterprise Survey conducted in 2009.”

If you have anymore questions feel free to reach out to John Cocklin or Catrina Cuadra