# **II. Data Description**

Facebook, in partnership with the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), conducts a bi-annual global survey on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that use Facebook. This _Future of Business_ survey currently includes 97 countries across every geographic region.<sup>5</sup> The _Future of Business_ (FoB) survey instrument was redesigned for the December 2018 wave to contain a set of questions capturing firm performance outcomes, as well as information from the business owner or manager including his/her background, family history, education, skills, socioeconomic characteristics and other variables.<sup>6</sup> The survey was offered, by Facebook, to administrators<sup>7</sup> of Facebook-designated SME pages in the specified countries through Facebook for a period of two weeks in early to mid-December. The data were collected on the Facebook platform and the final clean and aggregated, anonymized data are now published on the World Bank Open Data portal.<sup>8</sup> The online survey format – as opposed to the traditional in-person household survey – may be subject to higher rates of attrition or non-completion and therefore the survey had to be especially cautious of long and/or sensitive questions. However, the online format enabled data to be collected simultaneously across a number of countries and allowed us to target a wide range of firms that may have not shown up on traditional sample frames (e.g. lists of registered firms). Moreover, its convenience for the respondents compared to an in-person survey may have led to higher response rates with the survey duration being capped at approximately 20 minutes.

The sample of respondents of the _Future of Business_ survey are limited to those business owners/managers<sup>9</sup> with internet access and Facebook accounts with a business page. Therefore, the authors caution that the sample should not be considered representative of all business owners but a select group of global micro, small and medium enterprises. Nonetheless, the unprecedented level of geographic coverage and sample size on these variables offered by the survey allow us a unique chance to examine these questions on a global scale. Since internet bandwidth and Facebook coverage have increased dramatically in recent years, with an approximate 2.3 billion monthly active users on Facebook<sup>10</sup> at the time of writing, there is considerable scope to learn from this survey. The geographic coverage of the survey has also increased with 11 Sub-Saharan African countries included in this current round that were not present in previous rounds.<sup>11</sup>

> 5 Map presented in Appendix A displays the geographic coverage of the December 2018 wave of the _Future of Business_ Survey and the table in Appendix B provides information for all the countries included in the analysis plus the percentage of female respondents per each country.

> 6 Facebook did not share any platform data that were not collected through this particular survey round. In the analysis for this paper, we use only anonymized survey responses.

> 7 Note some categories of businesses were excluded (governments etc.) from the sampling frame.

> 8 World Bank Open Data portal: https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/future-business-survey-aggregated-data

> 9 While the _Future of Business_ survey targets administrators of business pages which could include business owners, managers, and employees; this paper analyzes the responses from owners and managers only.

> 10 Total number of individuals on Facebook are estimated to be equal to the number of monthly active users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2018 that were using Facebook Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook- <u>users-worldwide/</u>

> 11 Includes Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Botswana, Benin, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ghana, and Cameroon.

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