The Benefits of Own Data Collection through Firm-Level Surveys

practical experiences of the partners in the field. The survey was piloted in Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The survey was further revised and programmed into Qualtrics, the computer-assisted personal interviewing software that was used to carry out the survey. The survey was carried out with regional partners, mostly think tanks, listed in table B.1.

The Benefits of Own Data Collection through Firm-Level Surveys

The key advantages of data collection through firm-level surveys are

• inclusion of all countries in the region, large and small, in a consistent framework;

• collection of outward investment positions, which are not typically collected;

• capture of known outward investors through a nonrandom part of the sample, which would have most likely been missed in a random sample;

• capture of private and family firms, which do not typically report data, as well as large firms;

• inclusion of the agriculture, manufacturing, and services sectors;

• allows special consideration of India’s connectivity-challenged North Eastern Region;

• defines indicators for and collects data on nontypical variables related to social capital and information frictions, which are important in trade and investment analysis for South Asia. These variables include bilateral trust, bilateral knowledge connectivity, and networks.

At the same time, the study did not collect detailed cost, production, and revenue data that may be available in a census of industry, and therefore cannot provide precise estimates of certain factors along the lines of recent econometric analysis of multinational firms based in high-income economies. The goal was to include economically important firms that invest abroad but that typically do not report data (especially for family-owned firms) and to include data from as many firms as possible from all countries (including small economies) in the region. Frontier analysis on outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) focuses on US firms investing abroad because, by law, these firms must fill out statistical surveys for the government. Thus, similar analyses are beyond the scope of what is possible for South Asian firms. For example, in the United States, firms and individuals that own a 10 percent or greater voting interest outside the United States must file a BE-577 report quarterly, a BE-11 report annually, and a BE-10 report once every five years. These reports are administered by the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the US Department of Commerce. Failure to file may lead to civil and criminal penalties. The bureau’s website provides the questionnaires (https://www.bea.gov/surveys/diasurv).