Business Practices in Small Firms in Developing Countries 2008-2014

The dataset documented here contains information from surveys of micro and small enterprises conducted in Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka between 2008 and 2014. Researchers from the World Bank and the University of Warwick developed a survey instrument with 26 questions that measured business practices in marketing, stock-keeping, record-keeping, and financial planning. The goal of the research was to examine the relationship between management practices and firm outcomes.The surveys samples varied in their representativeness and size, because they were in most cases conducted as part of impact evaluations of particular programs. The surveys conducted in Bangladesh, Kenya, Mexico, and Sri Lanka provided representative samples of firms of particular size cutoffs, while those in Ghana and Nigeria came from applicants to business plan competitions. The Chile survey was administered to a sample of applicants to a government microenterprise training program.