A specialized survey was designed to collect data needed for the Dimensions of Informality in Bangladesh report. The survey was conducted between March and May 2010 by Data International Ltd., and covered 1724 enterprises. The sample frame for these enterprises was the EGI Census of 55,817 firms in the randomly selected areas in urban parts of the 19 old districts. The sample was stratified by firm size (in terms of full-time employment) and broad industry (manufacturing, trade or services), and was chosen to be representative of firms with 3 to 99 full-time workers in these areas. Oversampling of firms with 10-99 full-time workers was done to ensure sufficient sample sizes of these firms, which are less prevalent than firms with fewer workers. In practice 20 percent of the final sample were actually of size 1 or 2 workers, and 2 percent had more than 100 workers – this likely reflects changes in firm size from the time of listing to the time of surveying, as well as seasonality in employment.
