Integrated Business Establishments Survey 2019

The IBES 2019 generated the required Business Register for business establishments in South Sudan, which can be used for any business establishment survey. For enterprise surveys, an Establishment Censuses (EC) or business registries undertaken by a country at regular intervals generally provide the sampling frame, giving a count of enterprises and workers by broad industry group at the primary level of geographical units. In South Sudan there is no establishment census or useable business registry that has ever been undertaken, and in such circumstances, the listing of businesses/enterprises and workers by broad industry group in the concerned geographic areas was used as the only option. As it was done for the IBES 2010, the listing of all enterprises and workers (in formal and informal sectors) by broad industry group for the selected 12 major towns/cities that took place in June-July 2018 listed 13, 348 businesses that served as the sampling frame for the IBES 2019. This listing process collected minimum required information for sampling frame purposes, such as name and location of each business establishments, the main economic activity of the business in ISIC format, number of workers/employees, registration status, maintaining regular accounts or not and the year of establishment, among others.

Formal and Informal Sectors:
The existing definition of formal business used in IBES 2010 as described above had limitations due to the fact that it did not consider the registration status with tax government agency (i.e. value added tax and/or income tax), and the status of keeping accounts, which was recommended and implemented in IBES 2019. The required information for the new definition of “formal sector” was also collected during the listing operation.

Using the information collected from the listing operation, about 55 percent of listed business establishments were formal irrespective of the employment size. However, when the employment size factor was considered, i.e. adding a third condition of having 6 or more employees (Medium and Large business establishments), only about 10.7 percent of business establishments were classified as “formal sector”. Given also the fact that the average number of employees per surveyed enterprises in 2010 was 2.7, and that about 58.7 percent of listed business establishments had 0-2 employees, it was highly important to have proper definition of Micro, Small, Medium and Large enterprises in terms of number of employees for sampling purposes. Based on the information of the IBES 2019 listing operation, table 3 describes the distribution of listed business establishments by different size of employment. It is observed that 13.8 percent of listed business establishments are classified as medium and large.

Sampling and stratification:
The IBES 2019 sampling frame includes 13,348 business establishments from both formal and informal sectors based on the new definition. In order to improve the sampling efficiency for business surveys, it was important to stratify the business enterprises in the frame by size of employment, generally defined in terms of the total number of employees. Therefore, the frame was stratified by the following categories of employment size:

• 0-2 employees
• 3-5 employees
• 6-9 employees
• 10+ employees

The reasons of proposing these categories of employment size for stratification are that in developing countries, business environment is largely composed of informal sector where the majority of business establishments are micro and small in nature. For example, many business establishments are small shops in the neighborhood, and often owned by households, and most of the time, the family will employee 1 or 2 people to work in such shops. For business surveys, it is very important to stratify them under such small employment size to capture the reality on the ground. The same employment size category is also used to allow comparability with IBES 2010 survey. Given the important contribution of the medium and larger business enterprises to the value of production, capital investment, value added and other measures of the economy, and comparability with IBES 2010, it was important to include all the business establishments with 6 or more employees in the IBES 2019 sample with certainty (that is, with a probability of selection equal to 1). Therefore, there were 1,838 business establishments with 6 or more employees for all economic sectors in the sampling frame.