The Investment Module
What drives business investment in the EU? What holds it back?
The main module of the survey involves interviews with 12,800 SMEs and larger corporates:
- It collects data on firm characteristics and performance, past investment activities and future plans, sources of finance, financing issues and other challenges that businesses face.
- It is designed to be representative across different sectors, firm sizes and all EU Member States, and the US.
- It is designed to build a panel of robust and comparable firm data to enable the analysis of investment and business environment trends over time.
- It will be used to inform policy dialogue on the drivers and barriers to investment and to support better policy making on how to support business at both the national and EU levels.
Who is invited to take part?
Panel respondents: Participants who took part in the previous wave of the survey in 2022 and provided their permission to be contacted again.
New respondents: Businesses with five employees or more from the non-financial corporate sector across the member states of the European Union and the US have been selected at random. Within these businesses, we are inviting the senior person who is best able to talk about his or her company’s investments.
Selected businesses are active in the economic categories listed under point C to J in the NACE database.
Preparing for the survey
To help you select the right person in your organisation to participate, and prepare for the interview, we have created a pre-interview questions sheet. Other participants have told us it is helpful to see these questions in advance.
What reassurances can we give about the survey?
We would like to reassure those taking part in the survey that:
- All interviews will be conducted within the ESOMAR (The World Association of Research Professionals) Market Research Code of Conduct. This means that responses will remain completely confidential and your data will only be accessed by the research teams within EIB and Ipsos.
- Your survey data will be linked to data already held about your company from Bureau Van Dijk (Moody’s) ORBIS database, Bloomberg, Rating Agencies and PATSTAT, the worldwide patent statistical database and other commercial providers of publicly available information, but your confidentiality will be maintained.
- We would still like to speak to you even if you have not had any issues with accessing finance, to help us ensure that our findings are representative of all organisations.
- Aggregate, anonymised findings from the survey will be published in order to help businesses like yours.
If you have any doubt or would like more information about the survey, please contact Sarah McHugh at Ipsos (Sarah.McHugh@ipsos.com) or Julie Delanote at the European Investment Bank (eibis@eib.org).