from questions about the delay involved in having a new phone line installed, the number of days required to clear a domestic or foreign money wire, the number of days with power outages in the last year, and whether a firm has chosen to install its own power generator. Table 1 shows descriptive statistics of these measures by country.

**Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of the Services Performance Measures**

|Objective mea|sures<br>|||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||Number<br>obtain a<br>connect|of days<br>telepho<br>ion|to<br>ne|Numbe<br>clear a<br>currenc|r of day<br>foreign<br>ywire|s to|Numbe<br>clear a<br>currenc|r of day<br>domest<br>ywire|s to<br>ic|Numbe<br>power o<br>year|r of days<br>utages in|of<br>a|Percen<br>owning|tage of<br>a gen|firms<br>erator|
|Country|mean|p50|N.|mean|p50|N.|mean|p50|N.|mean|p50|N.|mean|p50|N.|
|Ethiopia|155|90|147|7.9|5|50|2.1|1|181|||0|17%|0|418|
|Kenya|99|42|171|||0|||0|84|40|247|71%|1|278|
|Madagascar|64|30|69|7.5|5|183|3.5|2|256|78|30|240|22%|0|293|
|Mauritius|22|10|89|3.5|3|171|1.5|1|166|8|4|199|39%|0|204|
|South Africa|8|5|241|3.6|3|414|2.5|2|522|6|4|384|9%|0|603|
|Tanzania|23|14|68|6.3|4|93|4.4|3|139|67|48|211|55%|1|271|
|Uganda|33|7|130|||0|||0|71|30|268|36%|0|300|
|Zambia|89|30|20|4.6|4|161|2.4|2|144|38|17.5|204|39%|0|205|
|Subjectiveme|asures:Se<br>|rvices as <br>|anobst<br>|acle to bu<br>|siness o<br>|na 0 to<br>|4scale<br>|||||||||
||Telec|ommuni|cations|Acces|s toFina|ncing|Cost|of Fina|ncing||Electricity|||||
|Ethiopia|1.5|1|408|1.9|2|355|1.9|2|338|2.1|2|416||||
|Kenya|2.1|2|272|2.0|2|270|2.9|3|266|2.3|2|270||||
|Madagascar|1.2|1|293|2.5|3|279|2.8|3|281|2.2|2|293||||
|Mauritius|0.6|0|204|2.0|2|202|2.3|2|202|0.9|0|204||||
|South Africa|0.5|0|603|0.8|0|603|1.2|1|603|0.7|0|603||||
|Tanzania|1.0|1|272|2.1|2|269|2.3|3|268|2.6|3|270||||
|Uganda|0.7|0|289|2.1|2|282|2.5|3|267|2.1|2|290||||
|Zambia|1.6|1|205|2.2|3|203|3.3|4|204|2.0|2|205||||

While the World Bank Enterprise Surveys have the advantage of containing information about services performance at a more disaggregated level than the country level, the fact that this information comes from the same firms whose performance we examine also creates challenges.

The challenges in this exercise are twofold. Relating a firm’s performance to its own perceptions of, or even its own measurable experiences with, access to services would create concerns about endogeneity. Perceptions are likely to be influenced by success, and a more efficient firm may be more efficient because of particular characteristics that also affect the treatment it receives from services providers, like size and the resourcefulness of the manager. These issues make a one-to-one juxtaposition at the level of the firm an unattractive empirical strategy. At the other extreme, aggregating all the information to the country level would make it impossible to control for other country-specific differences in governance, institutions, business climate or geography in a cross-section. And it would leave the unique variation at the sub-national level unexploited.

Our empirical strategy is thus to go the middle way by exploiting the regional variation within countries. Rather than using the individual firm’s responses to the services-related questions on the right hand side, we aggregate these responses up to regional averages. This reduces considerably the influence that an individual firm’s performance can have on the value of a right hand side variable. At the same time, regions within a country share all the possible 4