The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) says it will soon be inviting stakeholders for input as it prepares to conduct the second edition of the Integrated Business Establishment Survey (IBES) by the first quarter of 2023.
A Principal Statistician at the Service, Dominic Odoom, indicated that the survey, which was last carried out in 2014, is to, among other things, enable the GSS to prepare a business register that captured the relevant information of businesses for policy implementation and revenue mobilisation.
“We will collaborate with Metropolitan Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDA) and once we are done with data collection, for each district, we will give you the database of businesses identified in each district,” he said.
Mr Odoom said this at a workshop on improving Market and Firm Efficiency in Ghana, which was organised by the International Growth Centre.
Opinion
Meanwhile, a researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Dr. Emmanuel B. Mensah, has urged the GSS to increase the dissemination of the novel IBES findings in innovative ways to inform policy making and boost internal revenue generation.
He also encouraged the use of technology to capture key information such as location with GPS coordinates to allow for easy location of firms for further research work.
He added that “due to privacy concerns, there must be anonymity of data if GPS is added.”
IBES
The 2014 IBES was the first non-household economic census that provides information on the structure and performance of the covered all sectors of the Ghanaian economy and was subsequently used for rebasing of Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
It was carried out in two phases – a census phase focused on collecting basic data on 638,480 firms that jointly employ 3.38 million workers.
The Phase II of IBES collected and produced statistics on the operations of businesses based on the sample from phase I.
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