Our data on the first set of measures come from the 2001 and 2010 waves of the Uganda Business Register, a nationwide census of business establishments that the Government of Uganda has taken three times since 2001. The 2001 wave of the census –UBR 2001 henceforth ‐ covered nearly 165,000 business enterprises across the country. UBR 2010 covered about three times as many enterprises –at a little over 458,000 ‐ mainly reflecting the scale of net business formation since 2001, but in part also because it covered all commercial farms and micro agribusinesses that the 2001 wave would have excluded. The distributions of enterprises covered by both waves of the census are shown in Table 1 by single digit ISIC categories.

===== Table 1‐ here=== UBR 2001 and UBR 2010 both contain five key variables about each enterprise in the register, namely, the official name and identity of the enterprise, its exact location (in terms of GIS coordinates), description of its main activity in terms of a four digit International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) code, the number of persons engaged in the enterprise on the date of the census and the date that the enterprise started operating. For our purpose information on the last four of these variables has been transformed into counts of enterprises and their workers each of which is then aggregated for each census year in two dimensions, namely, spatially at the level of the sub‐county as the basic unit of analysis and by industry at the four‐digit ISIC level.

Disaggregating enterprise counts and employee counts at sub‐county level or industry‐level by enterprise age and enterprise size groups provides a picture of two important dimensions of the changes that may have taken place in the structure of employment and production over the decade spanning the two censuses. For example, comparing, enterprise counts, employment levels, and job growth rates across enterprise size groups provides a sense of how far the structure of the economy has changed in terms of the relative importance of the formal/modern sector. Likewise comparing enterprise counts and employment across business age groups tells us by how much the job growth observed over the decade can be attributed to start up investment or new entry as opposed to expansion investment of established businesses. This is on top of the basic task of mapping out the reallocation over the same decade of employment across the other three sectorial divides‐ that is, traded vs. non‐traded, manufacturing vs. services, and comparative advantage industries vs others‐ that this paper does by aggregating up employment flows and enterprise counts from the individual four‐ digit ISIC industry and the individual sub‐county as the basic unit of observation.

# 2.1.2. Uganda Business Inquiry (UBI): The 2002 and 2009 Waves

While UBR2001 and UBR2010 thus seem to have basic information for making an assessment of the scale and type of structural change that the Ugandan economy underwent in the 2000s, they have very little else of the information needed to infer the implications of the change to aggregate productivity. For that we need to use the 2002 and 2009 waves of the Uganda Business Inquiry (UBI), which, unlike the UBR is not a census but a sample survey of businesses carried out as part of the dataset feeding into 10