The annual EIB Group Survey on Investment and Investment Finance (EIBIS) is an EU-wide survey that gathers qualitative and quantitative information on investment activities of non-financial corporates, their financing requirements and the difficulties they face. In addition, the survey taps into topics of strong policy interest, such as digitalisation, climate change and supply chains.
The survey covers approximately 12 000 firms across the EU27 and 800 firms in the United States. It covers a wide spectrum of questions on corporate investment and investment finance. The survey’s data provide a wealth of unique firm-level information about investment decisions and investment finance choices, as well as other topics of policy interest. Using a stratified sampling methodology, it is designed to be representative at:
- EU level
- country level and
- sector group level (manufacturing, services, construction and infrastructure) and firm size class level (micro, small, medium and large), for most countries.
All survey respondents are sampled from the Moody's ORBIS database.
EIBIS is carried out annually, with the first wave of interviews having taken place in 2016. It is designed to build a panel of enterprise data. To this end, all firms that participated are invited to be re-interviewed in the following survey waves on a voluntary basis. To compensate for panel attrition and to ensure cross-sectional representativeness, panel firms are complemented in each wave with a top-up sample of new survey firms.
The EIB has commissioned Ipsos to implement the survey by means of telephone interviews. Interviews are carried out every year during spring-summer.
Conducting research with the EIBIS microdata
Firm-level data are available on a confidential basis to researchers for collaborative research projects with EIB staff, which should aim to result in a research publication. Researchers at universities and other research and policy institutions are invited to submit a research proposal to EIBIS_data_access@eib.org. The proposal should include:
- a short description of the research project, including a statement of the objectives and main hypotheses, and a prospective description of the variables and methodology to be employed;
- The CV of the researcher(s).
On the basis of the information provided, each proposal is assessed by a committee chaired by the Director of the Economics Department. The proposal is assessed in terms of its potential to advance our understanding of the needs, opportunities and constraints that businesses face with regards to investment and its financing. The assessment also takes into account the project feasibility and the availability of EIB staff to collaborate on it.