Business Associations. Additional details on the survey methodology are offered in Apedo-Amah et al. (2020); Cirera et al. (021b); and Cirera et al. (021a). For the WBES COVID-19 follow-up surveys, see for example Muzi et al. (2022).

Our sample covers 68 _,_ 007 firm-level observations from 61 countries. The list of countries and the number of firms sampled in each country is presented in Appendix Table A1.2 Small, medium-sized, and large firms, respectively, account for 6%, 23%, and 11% of the sample. And 19 _._ 3 % of firms in the sample are exporters. The sectoral distribution is skewed towards the non-agricultural sector that comprises 94% of firms in the sample (32% in manufacturing, 8% in hospitality services, 32% in retail services, 3% in knowledge -intensive services, and 19% in other services) (see Appendix Table A2).

We measure the amenability for remote work by the fraction of occupations that can be performed remotely in the U.S. computed in Espitia et al. (2021) using the 2017 O*NET data. This measure of amenability is computed at the level of both 2-digit and 4-digit sectors in the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC). The WBES already includes the 2-digit and 4-digit sector identifiers for each firm in the sample. For the BPS, we use the 2-digit and 4-digit ISIC identifiers obtained by Constantinescu et al. (2022) using the description of the economic activity for each business collected by the enumerator.<sup>3</sup> At the 2-digit ISIC level, the amenability to remote work ranges from 14% in crop and animal production and 32% in the manufacture of wearing apparel to 71% in computer . programming services and 72% in financial services (see Appendix Table A3) We measure internet penetration at the country level by the fraction of the population using the internet as well as by the number of secure internet servers per 1 million people for 2019 (or the latest year available before the pandemic).The share of individuals using the internet ranged from 15.0% in Madagascar and 16.5% in Mozambique to 89.9% in the Slovak Republic and 90.8 % in Cyprus. Similarly, the number of secure internet servers per 1 million people ranged from 3 in Burkina Faso and 8 in Madagascar to 83,313 in Estonia and 56,187 in Czechia (see Appendix Table A4). We measure the severity of the pandemic across countries and over time using data from Google mobility reports around transit stations (Google, 2021). For countries without available data, we impute the severity based on the Oxford Government Response Tracker index (Hale et al., 2021) following Apedo-Amah et al. (2020).

In countries among the top 5% in terms of digital infrastructure (% of the population using the internet), firms in sectors with greater amenability to remote work experienced a smaller decline in sales (Figure 1). However, in countries among the bottom 5% in terms of digital infrastructure, there is no clear relationship between greater amenability to remote work and the change in firms’ sales (Figure 2).

> 2The sample includes 43 _,_ 389 panel businesses, which were interviewed more than once in the 2-year span.

> 3The algorithm for allocating a 2-digit or 4-digit ISIC sector to each firm based on the firm’s main activity has been developed by Giesberts and Eapen (2022) and facilitates a fast, high-quality and, in great part, automatic ISIC assignation to text from multiple languages.

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