2014 censuses that would, without addressing them, make it impossible to estimate employment growth in Ghana over this period (Kerr and McDougall, 2019). The main issues we identified are differences in coverage of rural and urban areas, differences in the enumeration of associations and differences in coverage of the smallest firms.

In Kerr and McDougall (2019) we showed that the 2014 IBES enumerated a total number of own account workers that was around 5% of own account workers enumerated in the 2010 population census. The number is “only” 5% because the smallest firms did not qualify for the firm census (which excluded household‐based firms unless there was a sign indicating the presence of a firm in the household dwelling). But this same percentage was only 0.5% in the 2003 NIC. This means that the 2014 IBES covered a dramatically higher fraction of own account workers than 2003. The fraction of small firms covered also increased (Kerr and McDougall, 2019). To ameliorate this issue, we limit our main analysis to firms with 5 or more persons engaged. Persons engaged includes working proprietors, employees, unpaid family workers and apprentices, as a large fraction of Ghanaians working in manufacturing are not employees in the sense that the word is used in developed countries.

The 2014 census covered rural areas much better than the 2003 census (Kerr and McDougall, 2019). The 2003 NIC survey documentation notes that in rural areas only firms on the initial list of firms obtained prior to the census (likely obtained from tax records or the 1987 census) were enumerated, although enquiries were made of other firms in the vicinity. It is thus likely that rural areas would experience higher “employment” growth between 2003 and 2014, simply because coverage of rural firms was better in 2014. We ameliorate this issue in two ways. Firstly, we limit our analysis to firms with 5 or more persons engaged, as discussed above, since we think that the enumeration of larger firms was more comparable between 2003 and 2014 in both urban and rural areas. Secondly, in our regression analysis of the determinants of employment growth we include a control for the proportion of firms in each district in 2003 in rural areas.

Both NIC and IBES lacked information that could be used to classify firm locations as urban or rural. This classification is useful for discussions about economic development, as discussed above; it was therefore necessary to obtain a measure of whether a firm was based in an urban or rural area. This information is not typically obtained in a firm census or survey, despite being common in household surveys and population censuses. The solution undertaken in Kerr and McDougall (2019) was to use an urban/rural classification at the enumerator area level from the Ghanaian 2010 population census, data given to us by the Ghana Statistical Service. We then matched enumerator areas in this data to the firms in NIC/IBES based on the detailed location data collected in the firm censuses, which we have access to, such as the region, district, town and suburb. In this way firms were given a geotype depending on their location. The matching process resulted in the successful matching and classification of 94% of firms in NIC and 98.5% of firms in IBES as either urban or rural.<sup>4</sup> We use this variable in our analysis below.

# 3.2 Other sources of data

We also use two other sources of data which we merge into the industry‐district panel created from the firm censuses. The first is administrative data on imports and exports in each of the 13 industries. This is obtained from the Atlas for Economic Complexity.<sup>5</sup> The Atlas data were collected 4 Note that for both NIC (2003) and IBES (2014) it was necessary to use population census data from 2010 are there is no data from closer years available.

5 The data are available for download on the Atlas website: <u>https://intl‐atlas‐downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html</u> 8