Working Paper Series: Special Edition of 2016 to 2018 Interns

The PROTEqIN survey targets those establishments that were covered in the WBES for the LAC countries. Firms are added in some instances and re-weighted where deemed necessary. This survey was conducted using a conventional methodology with control for quality. Similar to the WBES for LAC, firms in the PROTEqIN survey were surveyed in strata’s according to size (small, medium and large) and sector. A broad range of topics were covered from business & legal environment, general information, legal and formality, foreign trade & competition, innovation, labor & skills and firm financing. For the purposes of our study, emphasis was placed only on those variables as it relates to firm characteristics as identified in the literature and credit assessment characteristics. The country variables real interest rate and GDP per-capita, which were used as control variables, were sourced from the World Bank. Data on these variables are in time-series format for the period 2014, corresponding with the year of the PROTEqIN survey. Some key characteristics of firms in the sample were summarized in Table.1 (appendix 1A); identifying firms by country, industry, ownership, legal structure and exporters. From table 1 it is observed that the ECCU comprises 39.6 per cent of the total firms in the sample followed by Trinidad & Tobago at 17.3 per cent, Jamaica 12.3 per cent and the remaining countries individually averaging between the ranges of 6 to6.5 per cent. In the industry, 66.4 per cent of the firms are in the services sector, whereas the remaining 33.6 per cent are in manufacturing. Of the total number of firms, 82.6 per cent are owned by private individuals, foreign individuals and firms own 15.8 per cent and 2.2 per cent are owned by governments. Of all the legally incorporated firms 36.3 per cent are owned by shareholding companies, sole proprietors own 36.6 per cent and 27.0 per cent are partnership industries. Finally, firms that engage in some level of export account for 21.0 per cent of the total no of firms in the sample. 3.1 Description of Variables One of the key dependent variable is “access to bank credit” which is defined as those firms which indicated that they utilise bank credit. It follows from the question “do you currently have a line of credit or loan”. So the variable takes a binary format where 1 = yes and 0 if otherwise.

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