# **IV. Methodology**

_Doing Business_ measures and compares 11 areas of business regulations, capturing their impact on firm establishment and operations. The reports attract a wide audience, including governments, private sector, NGOs, civil society organizations as well as academic and research communities. Media is one of the main avenues through which _Doing Business_ reaches its audience. To a certain degree, media coverage of the reports captures and shapes public opinion about domestic business climates, fostering a broader public debate about _Doing Business_ and its direct impact on local entrepreneurs and business climate. Media outlets can either veraciously portray _Doing Business_ data or distort the reports’ messages and findings in pursuit of a particular political agenda. The main objective of this paper, however, is to investigate whether local media coverage of _Doing Business_ spurs business regulatory reforms in the measured economies.

In order to test the set hypothesis, we first collected primary data on the global coverage of _Doing Business_ in the local media. Given the previous absence of such data, media-focused research primarily used freedom of press, state ownership of press and journalist abuse of Freedom House as well as relevant questions from World Value Surveys as the main input variables. Two search engines were selected for the collection of comparable media coverage data: Factiva and Google advanced search. These two domains have proven to meet the desired research criteria. The key search engine selection criteria included: access to a large comparable global database encompassing articles from a substantial number of local media sources; availability of reliable media article archives dating back to 2003; presence of search filers allowing to specify countries and time frames (months and years); ability to search for articles in local languages, including major local dialects; possibility to segregate results between the ones published by local and international media and existence of a user-friendly interface. Although more industrious, the concurrent use of two search engines was a deliberate undertaking. Having two similar novel data sets allowed for extra robustness checks, ensuring better accuracy of the novel data.

Google advanced search effectively caters information and news to the general public. Operating since 1997 and processing over three billion searches a day, Google has been the internet’s most used search engine with around 86% market share among all the web search platforms as of July 2018.<sup>5</sup> It almost instantaneously generates search results reflecting the content already published on the internet.

Factiva has been selected as a second prominent data collection and validation source. It is primarily designed to provide data to business communities and specialists, aggregating content from both private and public domains. Factiva provides access to more than 36,000 information sources, including newspapers, journals, magazines, television and radio transcripts. Similar to Google, Factiva has an almost universal reach, allowing to perform search in 28 languages in 200 countries. Factiva’s media database has the ability to filter search by frequency of publication, type of coverage, language, category of primary sources, geography and even industry group. Importantly, what differentiates Factiva from Google, is the ability to segregate results by local and international sources.

> 5 Statista 2018: <u>https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/</u>

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