the 508 firms.<sup>2</sup> As the table shows, it was not possible to reach 203 firms at all. On the other hand, contact was made with 305 firms. Of these 305 firms, 60 reported that they were permanently closed while 23 reported that they were temporarily closed. These firms did not answer the rest of the survey. The remaining 222 firms were additionally asked explicitly if they were currently operational and opening their doors or producing. Another 62 responded no to this question and did not complete the rest of the survey. This left 160 firms that were reached and are currently operational. These 160 firms were asked all the questions in the survey and serve as the basis for the analysis below.<sup>3</sup>

**Table 1: Status of firms when contact attempted in 2017**

|**Surveyed in 2009**|**508**|
|---|---|
|**Attempted in 2017**|**508**|
|**Not reached**|203|
|**Temporarily closed**|23|
|**Permanently closed**|60|
|**Working**|**222**|
|**Of these, operational and fully surveyed**|**160**|

There were a range of other challenges due to resource constraints and the nature of conducting a survey in a conflict affected country. A small pilot of 10 successfully completed surveys (from 32 attempted calls) was conducted in late March. Calls for the full survey began and were completed in April 2017. The pilot was done to try identify and, where possible, address implementation challenges. However, difficulties remained in the final survey. First, oversight of the survey firm by the World Bank was only conducted remotely. Supervision occurred through daily update email exchanges on survey progress, audits of the first 10 pilot surveys through scans of physical copies of the survey, and regular calls and video meetings with the survey firm and enumerators. Nevertheless, in‐person supervision would have been preferable. The main concern is whether questions were asked and coded in a consistent manner by all enumerators. The lack of in‐person monitoring made this harder verify, although its importance was repeatedly impressed upon the survey firm.

A second challenge was that the use of a phone survey resulted in reluctance by respondents to answer some questions. For example, the survey firm reported a reluctance to answer financial questions over the phone due to privacy concerns. Some adjustments were made to the questions after the 10 completed surveys pilot to try to improve responsiveness. However, on financial questions – as well as to a lesser degree on other questions – many firms still chose to respond “I do not want to answer” or “don’t know.” This limited the sample size for analysis on these questions. Finally, in a few cases the survey firm also had to call back the firm for a second time to complete the survey.

The 160 operational firms surveyed in 2017 are compared to the 508 firms surveyed in 2009 in Table 2 in terms of size, region and sector. There has been very little change in terms of the split of the sample by sector. However, large firms are a smaller share of the sample in

> 2 A more detailed breakdown is provided in Annex B with details of the size, sector, and region of all firms targeted, reached, closed, working, and operational.

> 3 Note that not all of the 160 firms answered every question, so statistics are often drawn from smaller samples, sometimes too small to draw conclusions, in which cases the results are not reported here.

3