High Frequency Phone Survey 2020, Assessment of the Impact of COVID-19 on Firms [Iraq]

Solicited key information about firms’ operational status before and during the pandemic, their general business outcomes, the severity of some of the challenges they have been facing, and finally some of their coping strategies. The focus on understanding the state of firms and business activity in Iraq during the pandemic comes from the recognition that it is a precursor to what may await the broader economy as well as workers and their families. The survey results highlight the importance of some key challenges that firms have faced since the beginning of the pandemic. This note is structured as follows: section 1 gives introduction. Section 2 describes the sample frame, sample selection, and the process of data collection. Section 3 briefly describes the questionnaire. Section 4 delves into the results such that it first gives a set of descriptive statistics of the firms that were interviewed, then elaborates on their responses related to the pandemic and its various challenges and coping mechanisms. Section five concludes with some policy implications.  The survey was administered to 671 firms from the Manufacturing and Services sectors in the Federal level and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is a relatively autonomous region dominated by the oil industry in Northern Iraq. It is comprised of three Kurdish-majority governorates of Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah.