Abstract

This research of businesses with one to four employees was conducted in Mauritius between June 2008 and February 2009, at the same time with 2009 Mauritius Enterprise Survey. Data from 86 manufacturing and services firms was analyzed.

Micro-Enterprise Survey topics include firm characteristics, gender participation, access to finance, annual sales, costs of inputs/labor, workforce composition, bribery, licensing, infrastructure, trade, crime, competition, capacity utilization, land and permits, taxation, informality, business-government relations, innovation and technology, registration, and performance measures. The questionnaire also assesses the survey respondents' opinions on what are the obstacles to firm growth and performance.

Geographic coverage

National

Analysis unit

The primary sampling unit of the study is the establishment. An establishment is a physical location where business is carried out and where industrial operations take place or services are provided. A firm may be composed of one or more establishments. For example, a brewery may have several bottling plants and several establishments for distribution. For the purposes of this survey an establishment must make its own financial decisions and have its own financial statements separate from those of the firm. An establishment must also have its own management and control over its payroll.

Universe

The whole population, or the universe, covered in the Enterprise Surveys is the non-agricultural economy. It comprises: all manufacturing sectors according to the ISIC Revision 3.1 group classification (group D), construction sector (group F), services sector (groups G and H), and transport, storage, and communications sector (group I). Note that this population definition excludes the following sectors: financial intermediation (group J), real estate and renting activities (group K, except sub-sector 72, IT, which was added to the population under study), and all public or utilities sectors.

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

For Mauritius, the sectors included in the sample by two-digit ISIC code were as follows: Manufacturing: 15, 18; Other Manufacturing: 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 , 36, 37; Services: 52; Residual/Remainder/Other Services: 45, 50, 51, 55, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 72. The Micro-Enterprise Survey targeted 120 registered establishments with one to four employees.

In Enterprise Surveys, the requirements for registration are defined on a country-by-country basis. In Mauritius, registration with the Register of Companies was used to define registered establishments.

Industry stratification was designed as follows: the universe was stratified into three manufacturing industries (food, textiles, and other), one services industry (retail) and one residual sector. The initial sample design targeted 120 micro establishments: 60 in manufacturing sector and 60 in services.

Given the stratified design, sample frames containing a complete and updated list of establishments as well as information on all stratification variables (number of employees, industry, and region) are required to draw the sample for Enterprise and Micro-Enterprise Surveys. Two frames were used in Mauritius. The first was a file of registered companies provided by the Central Statistical Office [CSO] in Mauritius updated to 2008. The second frame was supplied by the World Bank. It consisted of enterprises interviewed for Enterprise Survey (ES) in 2005. The World Bank required that attempts should be made to re-interview establishments responding to the 2005 survey where they were in the selected geographical regions and met eligibility criteria. That sample is referred to as the Panel.

The quality of the frame was assessed at the onset of the project and was not immune from the typical problems found in establishment surveys: positive rates of non-eligibility, repetition, non-existent units, etc. Given the impact that non-eligible units included in the sample universe may have on the results, adjustments may be needed when computing the appropriate weights for individual observations. The percentage of confirmed non-eligible units as a proportion of the total number of sampled establishments contacted for the survey was 35.2% (1039 out of 2,950 establishments for the ES and micro samples, including panel establishments).

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

The current survey instruments are available: - Enterprise Survey MICRO Module Questionnaire - Screener Questionnaire.

Micro-Enterprise Survey topics include firm characteristics, gender participation, access to finance, annual sales, costs of inputs/labor, workforce composition, bribery, licensing, infrastructure, trade, crime, competition, capacity utilization, land and permits, taxation, informality, business-government relations, innovation and technology, registration, and performance measures. The questionnaire also assesses the survey respondents' opinions on what are the obstacles to firm growth and performance.

Cleaning operations

Data entry and quality controls are implemented by the contractor and data is delivered to the World Bank in batches (typically 10%, 50% and 100%). These data deliveries are checked for logical consistency, out of range values, skip patterns, and duplicate entries. Problems are flagged by the World Bank and corrected by the implementing contractor through data checks, callbacks, and revisiting establishments.

Response rate

The Micro-Enterprise Surveys, along with all other surveys, suffer from both survey non-response and item non-response. The former refers to refusals to participate in the survey altogether whereas the latter refers to the refusals to answer some specific questions. Different strategies were used to address these issues.

Survey non-response was addressed by maximizing efforts to contact establishments that were initially sampled. When the survey frame was extracted from the sampling frame, several establishments with the same strata characteristics were randomly selected for each interview and each establishment was assigned a preference number. Substitutions of replacement establishments were made in order to help achieve targets on the number of interviews for each stratum. Extensive efforts were made to complete interviews with each first preference establishment before contact with a replacement establishment was allowed. At least four attempts were made to contact each sampled establishment for an interview at different times/days of the week before a replacement establishment was allowed to be contacted for an interview.

For micro firms the number of contacted establishments per realized interview was 8.48. For each establishment eligible for an interview, 0.68 refused to participate.

In completed surveys, item non-response was addressed by two strategies: a- For sensitive questions that may generate negative reactions from the respondent, such as corruption or tax evasion, enumerators were instructed to collect the "Refusal to respond" (-8) as a different option from "Don't know" (-9). b- Establishments with incomplete information on important questions including total sales, cost figures and employment levels were re-contacted in order to complete this information. However, re-contacts did not fully eliminate low response rates for some items.

Complete information regarding the sampling methodology, sample frame, weights, response rates, and implementation can be found in "Description of Mauritius Implementation 2009" in "Technical Documents" folder.