The Declining Role of Start-Ups

economix.blogs.nytimes.com

1 pointbranola3 comments

Interesting to compare with other seemingly-contradictory recent releases by the same Kauffman Foundation:

http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/despite-recession-us-entrep...

http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/number-of-new-companies-cre...

This article says that businesses created in the past 5 years have been a decreasing percentage of the total number of businesses. The two you linked to say that absolute business creation rates are stable-ish and/or growing a bit.

Therefore, I suggest that one or both of the following are happening:

- The total number of businesses has been growing, while the number of new businesses remained stable.

- New businesses are failing (or being acquired?) more quickly, leading to fewer new businesses, despite roughly the same new-business creation rate.

Maybe, but if the numbers can be represented in two very different ways-- by the SAME organization-- I'm not sure what those numbers tell us.

In today's article the concern was voiced that the data "“raise questions about whether the United States is becoming less entrepreneurial given the lower pace of start-ups and the smaller share of activity accounted for by young firms.”"

However, reading the previous two Kauffman pieces would seem to allay that concern.

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