Report, 2002).

The industrial importers import only for manufacturing or industrial

use but commercial importers import both consumer and industrial goods for resale.
Accordingly, the inclusion of both importers of major industrial and consumer
products facilitates comparison across buyer-seller relationship studies (e.g., Coote et
al., 2003; Skarmeas et al., 2002).

The sample frame was developed from the register of importers maintained by the
office of the Chief Controller of Import and Export of Bangladesh where 7,590
commercial and 569 industrial importers were registered up to December, 2003
(Import Control Bureau, 2003). This is an entrusted authority where registration is
compulsory for any kinds of import. However, verification of this database was
necessary before using it as a sampling frame because it was seldom updated to
remove inactive importers. To this end, leading commercial banks were contacted to
crosscheck the list of operative industrial and commercial importers from their
register of importer clients and current contact address of the importers. Earlier an
endeavour was made to verify the above list using Central Bank and Customs
databases, but it was understood that they are involved with maintaining the total
value of transactions Md._Abu_Saleh_Thesis 2006
and not maintaining a register for importers. As a result, a
validated list through the commercial banks was used to develop a list of active
importers and that was used as a sampling frame.

The specific sampling strategy was stratified random sampling because two
subgroups of importing firms were encountered (commercial and industrial
importers) and drawn from the sampling frame separately. Stratified sampling
involves extracting proportionate representation of multiple groups of firms
considered in the research (Reynolds et al., 2003). However, Bangladesh Bank
Statistics indicate that the ratio of industrial and commercial import in dollar terms
are approximately 60% and 40% respectively (Bangladesh Bank Report, 2002).
Therefore, disproportionate stratified sampling was appropriate to produce more
efficient estimates than proportionate sampling (Churchill, 1991).

The rationales for using this sampling strategy were to increase precision without
increasing cost and to reduce the sample variation. While the technique offers an
opportunity to reduce sampling error towards an increasing level of confidence
(Churchill, 1991), this was also ensured by the representation of two importing

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