Celebrating 20 years of the World Bank Enterprise Surveys: Insights from the first complete global cycle, 2023-2026

Twenty years ago, the World Bank Group began asking firms simple yet powerful questions: How do firms experience the business environment in which they operate? What does it take to run a business? On May 20th, 2026, the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) marked two decades of doing exactly that while achieving a historic milestone: for the first time, the globe was covered in a single three-year cycle; the 2023–2026 database now spans 164 economies across every continent. The anniversary brought together experts, researchers, and policymakers to discuss what enables firms to innovate and grow — a question the WBES has been uniquely positioned to answer since 2006. With more than 470 surveys conducted across more than 180 economies and nearly 300,000 interviews with business owners and top managers, the program has built the world's most comprehensive and freely accessible source of firm-level information on the business environment. By going directly to firms, the program captures what traditional indicators often miss: how businesses adopt new technologies, respond to competition, hire workers, and navigate their operating environment, revealing which conditions are most closely linked to innovation, productivity, and job creation. Twenty years of consistent, comparable data have also made it possible to track genuine progress — or regression — across economies over time. The impact speaks for itself: WBES data have informed more than $90 billion in World Bank Group programs, supported over 1,300 peer-reviewed studies, provided key performance indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals, and been featured in major international analyses such as the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report. The data now also serve as a foundational input into the World Bank's Business Ready flagship report, helping to shape the next generation of private-sector reform. What can we learn from the first complete global cycle (2023-2026) of our Enterprise Surveys data? Here, we highlight three findings on differences in firm performance across economies, the factors associated with innovation and productivity, and the outcomes of innovative activity. Figure 1: WBES data coverage in 2023-2026, 164 economies 1. Higher-income economies innovate more and have a more even distribution of productivity across firms than lower-income economies. Firms in high-income economies are not only more productive on average but also show less productivity dispersion. As shown in Figure 2, the most productive firms in low- and lower-middle-income economies are 5.9 times more productive than the least productive firms in those economies. That ratio declines to 4.1 in upper-middle-income economies and to 2.8 in high-income economies. Lower-income economies, therefore, face not only lower average productivity but also greater internal dispersion, a pattern consistent with resource misallocation and market inefficiencies that can constrain aggregate productivity and growth. Innovation follows a similar pattern. Only 16 percent of firms in low- and lower-middle-income economies report introducing a new product or process in the past three years, as defined by the Oslo Manual, compared with 23 percent in upper-middle-income economies and 28 percent in high-income economies. Together, these findings underscore a broader lesson from Enterprise Surveys data: firm performance is closely tied to the environment in which firms operate. Economies with stronger regulatory and institutional frameworks tend to foster innovation and spread productivity gains more broadly across firms, whereas weaker business environments often concentrate economic dynamism among a relatively small group of high-performing firms. Figure 2: Dispersion in labor productivity by income groups 2. Better management is associated with more innovation, and aggregate gender gaps can be misleading. The breadth and depth of the WBES data allow us to examine many factors associated with firms' capacity to innovate. One of the most important is management quality. A 10 percentage point improvement in the WBES management quality index is associated with a 3 percentage point increase in the likelihood of innovation. This relationship is even stronger in more complex regulatory environments, where the association rises to 4 percentage points, compared with just 1 percentage point in less demanding regulatory settings. These findings suggest that strong management practices may be particularly valuable in helping firms adapt, identify opportunities, and maintain the organizational capacity needed to innovate. WBES data also reveal a more nuanced picture of gender and firm performance than simple comparisons often suggest. As shown in Figure 3, overall differences between men- and women-led firms can mask important underlying patterns. Women-led firms tend to demonstrate stronger management practices and maintain comparable overall performance despite operating in more challenging environments shaped by regulatory, institutional, and socio-cultural constraints. In other words, their performance reflects resilience in the face of additional barriers rather than the absence of them. Figure 3: Overall gender gaps can be misleading 3. Innovation is associated with more jobs and greater resilience to informality. The data reveal meaningful differences in outcomes between innovative and non-innovative firms. Firms that introduce product or process innovations are associated with 1.3 percent higher employment growth, a pattern that holds across all income groups. Other growth-oriented activities — including investment in fixed assets (3.1 percent), quality certification (3.0 percent), and adoption of foreign technology (2.9 percent) are associated with even larger employment gains, suggesting that innovation is part of a broader set of firm capabilities linked to growth. Innovation is also associated with greater resilience in the face of informal competition, a persistent challenge in many developing economies. As shown in Figure 4, non-innovative firms facing informal competition experience a 17 percent decline in labor productivity, compared with 11 percent among innovative firms. While informal competition is associated with lower productivity for all firms, the productivity penalty is substantially smaller among firms that innovate. Figure 4: Innovation can act as a shield from informal competition These findings offer only a glimpse of what comparable, representative firm-level data can reveal. All WBES data are publicly available through the WBES website, where users can access economy-level indicators, and through the WBES data portal, which provides both economy-level and cross-economy databases for deeper exploration. As the global development agenda grows more complex, the value of listening directly to firms — consistently, comparably, and at scale — remains as relevant as ever. Understanding what firms experience, what shapes their performance, and what enables them to grow can inform better policies and more effective programs that support a thriving private sector. As WBES marks its twentieth anniversary, it does so with the most comprehensive picture of the global private sector it has ever assembled and a continued commitment to expanding that knowledge base. The central premise of the Enterprise Surveys remains unchanged: firms themselves are among the best sources of information about the opportunities and obstacles that shape economic development. As WBES enters its next decade, that perspective will remain essential for understanding how economies can foster innovation, create jobs, and build more productive and inclusive private sectors.