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 Who Contributes to BEEPS?
How is the BEEPS different from Doing Business?
How is BEEPS different from the Investment Climate Surveys?
How is the BEEPS different from Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (TI-CPI) and the World Bank Institute's Governance Indicators (WBI-GI)?
Isn't BEEPS just a corruption survey?
Doesn't the survey just cover perceptions?
How big are the samples?
How are the samples chosen?
What is the survey implemented?
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Who Contributes to BEEPS?
The EBRD-World Bank Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) is a joint initiative of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank. Within the World Bank, two departments contributed to the BEEPS: the Europe and Central Asia Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Department and the Investment Climate Unit.
How is the BEEPS different from Doing Business?
The BEEPS and the World Bank Group's Doing Business are complementary efforts to examine the environments in which firms do business. They use different methodologies and answer related, but different, questions.
Most of the Doing Business indicators are generated by asking lawyers, accountants, and other professionals in each country about the details of the laws, rules, and procedures that govern various aspects of doing business. In order to compare apples to apples, the Doing Business methodology presents hypothetical cases or situations that are the same for each country. Doing Business can be thought of as a compilation of indicators about various government policies, rules, and procedures.
The BEEPS, in contrast, asks 200-600 firms in each country questions about their business environment and their interactions with the state. The samples are chosen in a uniform way in each country, with sector composition divided according to contribution to GDP. The BEEPS can be thought of as a compilation of indicators about what firms are saying about the ways that government policies, rules, and procedures are implemented in practice.
Often Doing Business and BEEPS suggest the same headlines. Doing Business in 2006 highlighted Europe and Central Asia as the leading reformer this year, and the BEEPS 2005 results also suggest improvement over the past three years in many areas. In countries where the results do not seem congruent, there are many possible explanations. Firms may have found ways to work around problematic regulations so that they are less burdensome; conversely, the formal rules and procedures may appear benign, while non-transparent implementation may cause firms considerable difficulty. In addition, improvements captured in the Doing Business indicators may take time to be recognized by the business community. For example, reductions in the minimum capital requirements to start a company will not help the firms that are already in existence.
How is BEEPS different from the Investment Climate Surveys?
There is a tremendous amount of overlap between the questionnaires used in the BEEPS and the ones used in Investment Climate Surveys (ICS) in other regions. The participation of the World Bank's Investment Climate Unit in the BEEPS helped to enhance cross-regional comparability of results. There are, however, differences in the sampling approach used in the ICS, which tend to focus on manufacturing firms. To ensure comparability with the 2002 BEEPS, while simultaneously allowing comparability with ICS in other regions, the 2005 round of the BEEPS consisted of two parts: The Main BEEPS sample was drawn from the universe of firms in a broad range of economic activities, while a Manufacturing Overlay was added, above and beyond the Main BEEPS sample, in seven countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, and Romania). In addition to allowing comparability to other regions, the Manufacturing Overlay allows for certain types of analysis for which the production technology must be consistent and narrowly defined.
How is the BEEPS different from Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (TI-CPI) and the World Bank Institute's Governance Indicators (WBI-GI)? Aggregate governance indicators, such as WBI-GI and TI-CPI, attempt to take various forms of existing indicators (expert opinions and surveys) and merge them together into a single index. (In the case of WBI-GI, six indexes.) Neither WBI's indicators nor the TI-CPI is an original source of data. They are both essentially compilations and manipulations of other indicators. These indexes are popular among researchers because they cover hundreds of countries and they have been useful for raising the profile of corruption and governance issues. The BEEPS, in contrast, is an original source of data that offers several useful features not found in aggregate indicators:
The aggregate indicators employ different combinations of indicators in different countries. BEEPS, in contrast, applies a common yardstick to country comparisons.
Neither WBI's indicators nor the TI-CPI allows for examination of changes over time, although they are often improperly used for this purpose. (i) By construction the WBI indicators are scaled to have a mean of zero every year, and the TI-CPI focuses only on relative ranks. (ii) The TI-CPI uses data up to three years old, and both TI-CPI and the WBI indicators give a heavy weight to expert opinions which tend to be adjusted infrequently. The WBI indicators generally do not reuse identical data, although the 2002 round of the BEEPS was included in both the 2002 and 2004 sets of WBI indicators. BEEPS, in contrast, allows for simple statistical checks for changes over time using techniques that have been around for some 80 years.
Aggregates such as WBI's indicators and the TI-CPI lump everything together as "corruption" or "control of corruption." BEEPS, in contrast, allows for an examination of different types of corruption, how much, how frequent, to which sorts of government officials, etc. BEEPS also allows an examination of which firms are most impacted, etc.
Isn't BEEPS just a corruption survey?
Although corruption is one of the topics covered by the questionnaire, many other aspects of the business environment and enterprise performance are also present, including: crime, regulations and red tape, customs and taxes, labor issues, firm financing, legal and judicial issues, infrastructure, etc. To put matters in perspective, of the more than 400 variables in the BEEPS dataset, less that 25 pertain to corruption, unofficial payments, or tax evasion. That is less than 7% of the database.
Doesn't the Survey just cover perceptions?
The questionnaire steers clear of pure perception questions, asking instead about specific aspects of the business environment as they affect their firm or similar firms.
How big are the samples?
The 2005 round of the BEEPS consisted of 9,655 interviews, including 1,715 for the manufacturing overlay. Sample sizes ranged from 200 in smaller countries, to 599 in Russia. The survey was carried out in every ECA country except Turkmenistan.
The 2002 round of the BEEPS consisted of 6,667 interviews, covering a range of 170 to 514 firms per country. The survey was carried out in every ECA country except Turkmenistan.
The 1999 round of the BEEPS consisted of 4,104 interviews, covering a range of 112 to 552 firms per country. The survey was carried out in every ECA country except Serbia and Montenegro, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
How are the samples chosen?
The Main BEEPS sample was drawn from the universe of firms in a broad range of economic activities. In each country, the sectoral composition of the sample in terms of manufacturing (including agro-processing) versus services (including commerce) was determined by their relative contribution to GDP. Firms that operate in sectors subject to government price regulation and prudential supervision, such as banking, electric power, rail transport, and water and waste water, were excluded from the design of the sample. The Main BEEPS sampling approach was the same in all three rounds of the BEEPS, and was implemented nationwide.
The Main BEEPS sample in all three years included quotas along certain criteria to ensure sufficient numbers of firms to conduct analysis of firms with certain characteristics. Specifically,
Size: At least 10% of the sample was to be in the small (2-49 employees) and 10% in the large (250-9,999 employees) categories. Firms with only one employee or more than 10,000 employees were excluded
Ownership: At least 10% of the firms were to have foreign control and 10% state control
Exporters: At least 10% of the firms were to be exporters (firms that exports 20% or more of total sales)
Location: At least 10% of firms were to be in the category “small city/countryside” (i.e., population under 50,000)
Age: Enterprises which began operations in the three years prior to the survey were excluded.
From a practical perspective, the quotas that had an actual impact on the sample, compared to what would have arisen from a wholly random sample, were the ones for state ownership, for foreign ownership and for large size. In some countries these quotas were eased. As ownership and size are highly correlated, the quotas ultimately affected a relatively small proportion of the sample.
How is the survey implemented?
All questionnaires in every country in every round of the BEEPS were implemented the same way, through face-to-face interviews. This stands in contrast to some other cross-country firm-level surveys which use mixed combinations of face-to-face, telephone, mail-in, and online methods. |
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