Establishment census data collected by national registries, statistical offices, and ministries are the gold standard for information on establishments and firms and serve as a sample frame for firm surveys. They provide information on the number of firms by size, age, sector, and often, formality status. Most African countries carry out such censuses with considerable time gaps between rounds, because of the time and effort required to survey the entire universe of establishments.

While some form of economic censuses exists for Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Arab Republic of Egypt, The Gambia, Ghana, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Sierra Leona. Tunisia, Senegal, and Uganda, it should be noted that access to most of this census information is constrained or aggregated in statistical reports.<sup>5</sup> Comprehensive micro-data for this exercise was available only for Kenya, Burkina Faso, Cameron, Rwanda, and Ghana.

Although census data are available for some countries, coverage on economic censuses or firm registries varies considerably, compromising harmonization of the collected data across countries. For example, among the available micro-datasets, Cameroon’s registry excludes the taxi industry, while Ghana’s registry includes modern agriculture, albeit it states that the agriculture sector is not covered. In general, most of these registries and censuses focus on the non-agriculture sector, but to varying degrees.

We extract information about firm characteristics from World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES). WBES are firm-level surveys aiming to provide data that are comparable across countries for a representative sample of firms with 5 or more workers. The surveys cover a broad range of business environment topics, including access to finance, corruption, infrastructure, competition, and performance measures. WBES provides a comprehensive cross-country database for 194,000 manufacturing and services firms in 155 countries. The surveys, however, include mostly formal establishments with five or more workers, and therefore exclude micro-enterprises and informal firms, with a few exceptions. This focus on small to large formal firms might lead to a potential bias in the representation of the demographics of the firm in Africa (Li and Rama, 2015).

Another source of data on firms is the World Bank Entrepreneurship Database (WBED), which was not used in this analysis. WBED provides information on the number of private formal companies with limited liability for developing and developed economies on a yearly basis. This data would, hence, form a lower threshold for the number of firms in these countries. The database also provides information on firm entry and exit for selected economies derived from national business registries. A comparison between WBED and OECD’s _Structural and Demographic Business Statistics database_<sup>6</sup> , where available for both, reveals that firm exit may not be accurately captured because it requires firms to file the legal closing of the establishment with government entities to be included in the number of exiting firms. This might cause an upward bias in the number of formal firms, the extent of which is unclear. WBED also lacks information about informal or unregistered establishments. For these reasons, we exclude the WBED from this analysis.

> 5Aggregate numbers also prevent breaking down by size category because of idiosyncratic thresholds used in every context. Harmonization was attempted but the proposed analysis ultimately required microdata, restricting further the number of countries with census microdata at our disposal.

> 6Source: https://www.oecd.org/sdd/business-stats/structuralanddemographicbusinessstatisticssdbsoecd.htm

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