Nonetheless, the ES include rich information about the business environment, firms’ characteristics and owner’s characteristics. The data were gathered from interviews with top managers and CEOs in the formally registered non-agricultural private sector; firms that are fully state-owned are excluded from eligibility for the study.<sup>8</sup> As such they notably omit informal businesses, a sector known to comprise a predominant share of employment in Ghana. Another notable point in the case of Ghana is that the global Enterprise Survey methodology excludes extractive industries. Firms eligible for interviews operate in the manufacturing, construction, retail, wholesale, hospitality, and transport sectors (as well as IT firms).<sup>9</sup> Additionally, in the case of Ghana, firms with between one and four full-time workers (so-called ‘micro’ firms) were interviewed, and the data used here include this supplementary source of data.

The study was conducted using a stratified survey design, along dimensions of firm size (micro [1–4 employees], small [5–19], medium [20–99], and large [100+]), sector of activity within industry and services (food, chemicals/plastics/rubber, metals, other manufacturing, construction; retail, other services<sup>10</sup> ), and in four of the most active economic cities in Ghana: Accra Metropolitan Area and Tema (Accra), Kumasi (Ashanti), Tamale (Northern) and Takoradi (Western). In all, interviews were completed with 1,324 firms. Table 1 provides basic descriptive statistics of the sample.

The sample consisted of 720 small, medium and large registered establishments and 604 registered microenterprises with the Ghana Registrar’s General Department. These establishments were located from lists compiled from the following: firm registry, list of firms paying value added tax (VAT), list of large taxpayers, Ghana Chamber of Commerce and Industry, business associations; General Department of Cooperatives, District Assembly registries, and block enumeration conducted by the fieldwork team.

The information collected refers to characteristics of the firm at the moment of the survey or to the last completed fiscal year (2012). Sales, employment, and labor productivity annual growth rates are calculated comparing data from the last complete fiscal year of each survey and recall data. Consequently, growth rates refer to the period 2010–2012. In general, the private sector firms considered were small (with an average size of just under 13 employees).<sup>11</sup> Firms have been operating for just under nine years on average and while the average firm has more or less doubled its size over its lifecycle, the median firm

> 8 Firms that are partially state owned could be included, however in our sample we have only 8 firms with at least 1% of state ownership, making any analysis by state ownership not meaningful.

> 9 For more information on methodology, see: <u>www.enterprisesurveys.org/methodology.</u>

> 10 The Ghana ES include two sectors within industry according to the group classification of ISIC Revision 3.1: all manufacturing sector (group D); and the construction sector (group F). The ES does not represent firms operating in the mining and quarrying and electricity sectors (groups C and E). Within the service sector, the ES includes: wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurant (groups G and H); transport, storage, and communications sector (group I); and computer and related activities (group K, subsector 72, IT). It does not represent 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.

> 11 Table 2 presents some figures in their logged form; the exponentiated values are given here for simplicity and presentation.

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