The latest issue of The Economist used World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) data to argue that one of the keys to economic growth is for countries to be able to nurture an economic environment where small businesses can evolve into big and productive ones (article link in comments).

This is based on the finding of the most recent WBES analysis that in high-income countries, firms older than 25 years employ around two thirds more people than they did in their first five years, while in poor economies the figure is roughly one third.

That evidence exists because researchers collected it, establishment by establishment. The Enterprise Surveys only recently expanded to cover high-income economies, which is what made this comparison possible in the first place.

Kapa Research served as World Bank contractor for the most recent Enterprise Surveys (2024 to 2025) in the high-income economies behind these findings: the United States (n=2,589), Canada (n=1,015), the United Kingdom (n=1,003), alongside fieldwork in Colombia, Portugal, Hungary, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, and other markets.

Anyone who has experience with business surveys in high-income markets knows the challenges they involve. Screening to reach the owner or the senior manager who can actually answer the questions, not whoever picks up. A demanding questionnaire that asks for real financial figures and management practices. Repeated callbacks, several outreach modes, and month after month of fieldwork to hold the sample together. Response rates in these markets are low mainly because of the environment, not because of the study, and protecting representativeness under that pressure is one of the hardest things a survey company does.

Our teams of researchers did that work across three continents and several languages, day and night, under one common WBES methodology.

Thank you to all the respondents for their time and willingness to contribute to our surveys. And thank you to the World Bank Policy Indicators group and the Enterprise Analysis Unit for the trust, and for the opportunity to contribute to a dataset that is shaping how policymakers think about firm growth.

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