Edmund Malesky
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Making better use of business survey data:
Thoughts on overcoming the anchoring and nested data problems in
interpreting business survey results.
Companies marketing their products abroad have routinely and comically learned that even
excellent translation cannot overcome cultural priming.
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For instance, when Pepsi started selling
its products in China a few years back, they used their standard slogan, "Pepsi Brings You Back
to Life", which Chinese consumers read as "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave."
The tragic mistake in this marketing campaign was one of “anchoring” or the problem that
different cultures simply understand complicated concepts differently. Thus, it takes more than
simply dexterous translation to make sure survey respondents in different countries understand
the question in the same way. Gary King et al have shown convincingly that it haunts cross-
national survey research and recommend “anchoring vignettes” to elucidate difficult concepts,
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but lack of an anchor can even limit inter-provincial research, where the problem is no longer
cultural priming, but a lack of a unique reference point across provinces.
The organizing rule for this panel was to bring together political scientists, who have made
extensive use of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) in their
research.
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The goal, of course, is to allow “consumers” of this impressive array of carefully
collected data to compare findings and techniques for best utilizing this goldmine. Though my
use of the BEEPS data itself has been limited to crosschecking other measures of corruption and
governance across the transition states, I was heavily involved in the World Bank Hanoi office’s
attempt to extend this survey to Vietnam and use the findings to compare economic governance
across of 11 of Vietnam’s 61 provinces.
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I had hoped that through participation in the survey, I
might be able to glean some concrete measures of governance for use in my dissertation
research. Over the course of endeavor, two problems continually hobbled my efforts to make
1
The experiences have led to a whole page of humorous anecdotes on
www.jokes.com
.
2
Gary King, Christopher J.L. Murray, Joshua A. Salomon, and Ajay Tandon. "
Enhancing the Validity and Cross-cultural
Comparability of Survey Research
," forthcoming American Political Science Review.
3
Hellman, Joel, Geraint Jones, Daniel Kaufmann, and Mark Schankerman, “Measuring governance and state capture: the role of
bureaucrats and firms in shaping the business environment,” European Bank of Reconstruction and Development Working Paper
51, June 2000.
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Please see, Malesky, Edmund, “Entrepreneurs on the Periphery: A Study of the Environment for Private Sector Development
outside of Vietnam’s Central Engines” Mekong Project Development Facility (IFC) Private Sector Discussions, No. 15,
September, 2003. Asia Pacific School of Economics and Management & Central Institute for Economic Management in
Vietnam, 2002. Private Enterprise Development in Vietnam – draft. Unpublished manuscript written for IFC/MPDF and World
Bank survey of the private sector.
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