Abstract

This research was carried out in China between December 2011 and February 2013. Data was collected from 2,700 privately-owned and 148 state-owned firms.

The objective of Enterprise Surveys is to obtain feedback from businesses on the state of the private sector as well as to help in building a panel of enterprise data that will make it possible to track changes in the business environment over time, thus allowing, for example, impact assessments of reforms. Through interviews with firms in the manufacturing and services sectors, the survey assesses the constraints to private sector growth and creates statistically significant business environment indicators that are comparable across countries.

Usually Enterprise Surveys focus only on private companies, but in China, a special sample of fully state-owned establishments was included as this is an important part of the economy. Data on 148 state-owned enterprises is provided separately from the data of 2,700 private sector firms. To maintain comparability of the China Enterprise Surveys to surveys conducted in other countries, only the dataset of privately sector firms should be used.

Geographic coverage

Twenty-five metro areas: Beijing (municipalities), Chengdu City, Dalian City, Dongguan City, Foshan City, Guangzhou City, Hangzhou City, Hefei City, Jinan City, Luoyang City, Nanjing City, Nantong City, Ningbo City, Qingdao City, Shanghai (municipalities), Shenyang City, Shenzhen City, Shijiazhuang City, Suzhou City, Tangshan City, Wenzhou City, Wuhan City, Wuxi City, Yantai City, Zhengzhou City.

Analysis unit

The primary sampling unit of the study is an establishment.The 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 universe of the study, is the non-agricultural economy of firms with at least 5 employees and positive amounts of private ownership. The non-agricultural economy comprises: all manufacturing sectors according to the group classification of ISIC Revision 3.1: (group D), construction sector (group F), services sector (groups G and H), and transport, storage, and communications sector (group I). Note that this 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

The sample for China ES was selected using stratified random sampling. Three levels of stratification were used in this country: industry, establishment size, and region.

Industry stratification was designed in the following way: the universe was stratified into 11 manufacturing industries and 7 services industries as defined in the sampling manual. Each manufacturing industry had a target of 150 interviews. Sample sizes were inflated by about 20% to account for potential non-response cases when requesting sensitive financial data and also because of likely attrition in future surveys that would affect the construction of a panel. Note that 100% government owned firms are categorized independently of their industrial classification. The 148 surveyed state-owned enterprises were categorized as a separate sector group to preserve the representativeness of other sector groupings for the private economy.

Size stratification was defined following the standardized definition for the rollout: small (5 to 19 employees), medium (20 to 99 employees), and large (more than 99 employees). For stratification purposes, the number of employees was defined on the basis of reported permanent full-time workers. This seems to be an appropriate definition of the labor force since seasonal/casual/part-time employment is not a common practice, except in the sectors of construction and agriculture.

Regional stratification was defined in twenty-five metro areas: Beijing (municipalities), Chengdu City, Dalian City, Dongguan City, Foshan City, Guangzhou City, Hangzhou City, Hefei City, Jinan City, Luoyang City, Nanjing City, Nantong City, Ningbo City, Qingdao City, Shanghai (municipalities), Shenyang City, Shenzhen City, Shijiazhuang City, Suzhou City, Tangshan City, Wenzhou City, Wuhan City, Wuxi City, Yantai City, Zhengzhou City.

The sample frame was obtained by SunFaith from SinoTrust.

The enumerated establishments were then used as the frame for the selection of a sample with the aim of obtaining interviews at 3,000 establishments with five or more employees. The quality of the frame was assessed at the onset of the project through calls to a random subset of firms and local contractor knowledge. The sample frame 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 are 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 31% (6,485 out of 20,616 establishments).

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

The following survey instruments are available: - Services Questionnaire, - Manufacturing Questionnaire, - Screener Questionnaire.

The Services Questionnaire is administered to the establishments in the services sector. The Manufacturing Questionnaire is built upon the Services Questionnaire and adds specific questions relevant to manufacturing.

The standard 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, and performance measures. Over 90% of the questions objectively ascertain characteristics of a country’s business environment. The remaining questions assess 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 number of contacted establishments per realized interview was 7.24. This number is the result of two factors: explicit refusals to participate in the survey, as reflected by the rate of rejection (which includes rejections of the screener and the main survey) and the quality of the sample frame, as represented by the presence of ineligible units. The number of rejections per contact was 0.55.

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 as a different option from don’t know. b- Establishments with incomplete information were re-contacted in order to complete this information, whenever necessary.

Survey non-response was addressed by maximizing efforts to contact establishments that were initially selected for interview. Attempts were made to contact the establishment for interview at different times/days of the week before a replacement establishment (with similar strata characteristics) was suggested for interview. Survey non-response did occur but substitutions were made in order to potentially achieve strata-specific goals.

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