ITC Instability Indicators

Objective

To build business-specific “instability indicators” based on the International Trade Centre (ITC) Business Fragility Survey and Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED).¹

Description

The Business Fragility Survey is a national business-level questionnaire aimed at assessing how small and medium enterprises (SME) cope within fragile social and political environments. The Survey contacted around 2,600 businesses from eight developing countries, of which over 1,100 provided complete responses. The Survey was carried out in partnership with domestic business support organizations. Further details on the Survey can be found in the ITC SME Competitiveness Outlook 2023.

The ACLED Project is a disaggregated, global and open dataset of reported violent and certain non-violent events ( Raleigh et al. 2010). ACLED data are derived from local, regional and national sources and updated each week. The instability indicators are based on a subset of the available ACLED data accessed on 21 February 2023. Further details on ACLED can be found at their website here.

Each business in the Fragility Survey and each event in the ACLED dataset is geocoded. Thus, each business can be associated with nearby events and fatalities. These can be aggregated to proxy for local instability at the business-level defining an “event frequency” and a “fatality” indicator, respectively.

Further description of the data and methodology for the instability indicators can be found in the associated blog post.

References