Accra, June 27, GNA- The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) 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 next year, Mr Dominic Odoom, an official of the GSS, has said.
The Principal Statistician indicated that the survey, which was last carried out in 2014, was to among other things, enable the GSSto prepare a business register that captured the relevant information of businesses for the purposes of 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.
The 2014 IBES was the first non-household economic census that provides information on the structure and performance of the covered all sector of the Ghanaian economy, and 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 operations of businesses based on the sample from phase I.
Dr Emmanuel B. Mensah, a researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, urged the GSS to increase the dissemination of the novel IBES findings in innovative ways to inform policy making and boost internally 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 are added.”
GNA