# Annexes

## _Annex 1. Comparability with other existing SOE databases_

Most available SOE databases are not comprehensive as they either focus on collecting sectoral data or have limited coverage and scope. Databases that focus on specific sectors are primarily centered on economic sectors commonly associated with SOE presence, such as infrastructure and finance. Examples of infrastructure databases include the World Bank Database of Infrastructure State-Owned Enterprises (Herrera Dappe, et al., 2022), covering 19 countries and 135 SOEs between 2000 and 2018, and the 2017 State-Owned Enterprises Public Projects (SPI) database (PPIAF/The World Bank, 2017) compiled by the World Bank’s Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility. Analyses of SOE presence in the financial sector include the work of La Porta, Lopez de Silanes and Shleifer (2002), who assembled data on government ownership of banks in 92 countries, the cross-country data set of state-owned banks compiled by Andrianova, Demetriades, & Shortland (2012) for 1997-2007, and the WB State Bank Privatization database that covers 70 countries between 1995-2017 (Can, Calice, Diaz, & Masseti, 2020).

Other existing databases compile national or regional SOE data, although with limited global country coverage and scope. Hence, a comprehensive, global cross-country database that identifies SOEs and their financial data has never been compiled. Existing efforts so far are limited to certain regions and in particular, coverage of developing countries has been lacking. For example, in 2012, 2015, and 2017, the OECD conducted an exercise to identify the presence of SOEs across 40 economies, which provided aggregated data for about 2,400 firms including information on the number of SOEs and their sectoral distribution based on a self-reporting survey tool of participating countries.<sup>54</sup> However, the OECD effort relied heavily on the local SOE definitions, which can vary substantially across jurisdiction. The IMF also collected firm-level data for about 10,000 SOEs leveraging the ORBIS database from _Bureau van Dijk_ for the period 2014-2016 although this one excludes SOEs operating in natural monopolies or sectors where private firms are barely present (IMF, 2019), and omits countries with fewer than 30 SOEs or restricts the sample to the largest companies implementing some thresholds in assets.<sup>55</sup> The original exercise covered 20 countries in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (IMF, 2019) and in 2021, it was expanded to the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia region (IMF, 2021). The IADB led an exercise to collect financial performance information of non-financial SOEs for 16 countries in the LAC region covering the period 2010-2016 (Musaccio & Pineda, 2019). Other efforts include an analysis of majority-owned Chinese SOEs (Freund & Sidhu, 2017) (Harrison, Meyer, Wang, Zhao , & Zhao, 2019); the IMF Fiscal Monitor, which included firms with 20 percent of state participation and above (IMF, 2020); and the EBRD cross-country study on SOEs with about 12,000 companies with at least 25% participation of the state (Borkovic & Tabak, 2020). Table A.1 summarizes existing comparable SOE databases.

A global SOE database cannot be simply compiled by combining the various existing databases due to the lack of a uniform definition of SOEs. In absence of a commonly accepted definition of SOEs,<sup>56</sup> regional and sectoral exercises cannot be merged to create a single repository. As shown in Table A.1, each one of the aforementioned databases employs a different definition of SOEs with varying degrees of state ownership thresholds, and some of them follow countries’ official SOE definition, which varies significantly and complicates comparability even further. For example, the survey-based exercise led by the OECD quoted above collects information on the corporate entities recognized as SOEs by the respective national laws

> 54  https://www.oecd.org/publications/the-size-and-sectoral-distribution-of-state-owned-enterprises-9789264280663-en.htm

> 55 Given the low coverage for some countries such as Albania and Kosovo many were not included in the exercise. Annex 4 (IMF, 2019) indicates that the IMF database does not include neither SOEs in natural monopolies nor countries with less than 30 SOEs and limit the assessment to those with total assets over USD 100,000.

> 56 (IMF, 2020). https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/books/089/28929-9781513537511-en/ch03.xml

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