# **Appendix A: Description of the Future of Business Survey**

The Future of Business survey (FoB) is a collaboration between Facebook, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank to survey the 150 million businesses on Facebook.<sup>1</sup> This initiative began in 2016 to leverage the Facebook platform to administer surveys to micro, small and medium-sized businesses (MSMEs) globally in a timely and cost-effective manner.

In May 2020, the Future of Business survey adapted its standard bi-annual approach to run six monthly waves of the Future of Business survey to provide timely insights on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on small businesses and to take the pulse of the needs and challenges of these businesses. The COVID-19 monthly waves sample from 50 countries around the world where the Facebook small business penetration is sufficient to achieve a meaningful sample.<sup>2</sup> The first of these monthly surveys (Wave I) from 28-31 May 2020 (Wave 2 from 24-30 June, Wave 3 from 23-31 July, Wave 4 from 24-31 August, Wave 5 from 23-30 September, and Wave 6 from 23-31 October) surveyed around 26,000 small businesses. Survey wave 7 was conducted a year later from 15-30 September, 2021. The monthly survey waves are a repeated cross-section of approximately 25,000 businesses sampled across 50 countries from the target population. The collaborators developed a brief enterprise survey instrument to collect data measuring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business owners. The questionnaire is designed to measure the impact on some critical dimensions: operation of the business, revenues, employee adjustments, firms’ expectations and uncertainty about the future, and preferred mechanisms of public support. A number of gender-specific questions around time spent on domestic and care responsibilities were also included.

The target population of the Future of Business Survey are Facebook Page administrators that are identified as business owners and managers. There are over 80 million businesses estimated to be represented in this sampling frame (Facebook, 2018). A Facebook Page serves as a key interface for business activity on the Facebook platform and is most commonly used by small businesses to engage in advertising or generating content for Facebook audiences. The probability of the same business being resampled in any given wave has been calculated to be less than 0.06% among this population.

Facebook implements a modified simple random sample for survey invitations within each country. Surveys at Facebook are randomly sampled and once a respondent has been invited to a survey, they are ineligible for another survey for six months. This is to reduce response burden and maintain response quality. Sampling proceeds until country-level start quotas are met (quota for the monthly surveys were set to approximately 400 business owners and managers replying to the survey in most of the countries). Lower targets were set for countries where the population is not large enough to sustain 400 business owners and managers responding to the survey. Sampling weights are determined for survey non-response patterns using characteristics most closely associated with non-response to Facebook surveys.<sup>3</sup> Non-response weights are constructed using an inverse-probability weighting approach (IPW) and a logistic regression is used to predict the probability of response given eligibility for the survey (i.e. being in the target population). Initial weights are constructed using the inverse of the predicted probability of responding to the survey for every respondent and final weights are then created by trimming the initial weights the 1st and 99th percentiles for each country. The data are intended to be representative of the Facebook Page

> 1 The country level aggregated dataset from the Future of Business Survey is provided for free through a Creative Commons license and is available on the World Bank Data Catalog as well as on Humanitarian Data Exchange.

> 2 The bi-annual FoB surveys typically are done June and December of every year and cover a larger set of over 100 countries due to being less constrained by sample.

> 3 These characteristics include, but are not limited to: app language setting, recent frequency of app use, time since joining Facebook, gender, age, approximate sub-national region, country, main mobile device operating system and main mobile device age.

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