of tax and labor regulations. Small Sri Lankan firms faced a binding constraint in access to credit, while medium firms faced greater problems obtaining inputs and confronting increased governmental scrutiny.

In Cote d'Ivoire, a survey revealed that high taxes and tax regulations were extraordinarily burdensome to all but the smallest businesses, yet complex and apparently difficult labor regulations were not. The ease of avoidance through subcontracting, apprenticeships and informal means substantially relaxed an apparently imposing set of written regulations.

- A study of Ghanaian small business found regulatory problems to be of far less importance to small firms than other concerns, such as constraints on credit and inputs. Medium and larger firms faced a much wider range of regulatory problems, including price controls and labor regulations completely avoided by smaller firms.

- In Kenya, access to finance ranked as a serious constraint. Yet careful andlysis of survey responses revealed that this was not primarily due to a failure of financial institutions, but rather to difficulties of smaller firms in gaining access to land ownership, their primary means of collateralizing loans.

Evidently, such conclusions can be operationally valuable and often contradict conventional wisdom. But to attain useful results, care must be taken in the design of a questionnaire (a.k.a. "survey instrument"), the selection of a sample, the administration of the survey, and the analysis and interpretation of the results. While surveys can be performed economically, they must not be shortchanged on planning and care in implementation.

Equally important, survey results must be kept in perspective. The value of this new source of information in no way argues for the abandonment of other sources. Firms' responses have certain biases (discussed below), suggesting that results should always be weighed against other information sources and common sense.

What Should Be in Survevs? A survey is, by its nature, fairly short. It is difficult to hold the interest and justify of the expense of time of an entrepreneur for more than about an hour. Thus the breadth of focus is attained only at the expense of depth, and vice versa.

Each question should be regarded as a scarce resource, and its answer must yield information that is anticipated to have value in the fnal analysis. We recommend using the survey to fill gaps in knowledge or overcome any perceived biases in existing sources of information. Rather than attempting to cover all areas of relevance, probe a few areas in relative depth. A general question at the end of a survey can assess the relative importance of both those constraints covered in detail and other general constraints faced by enterprises throughout the world.

A survey is not an opinion poll. From the perspective of the PSA, the most valuable resource of entrepreneurs is their experience derived from working in the environment of a particular country and industry, and their resultant knowledge of their own unique problems and data. Questions should be oriented towards eliciting these firm-level experiences, identifying the importance of different 4