Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau and the SBA Office of Advocacy finally released the 2007 firm size class numbers that we normally see in March. In 2007, there were 27.8 million U.S. businesses, up from 26.8 million in 2006. That represents a 3.6% increase in the U.S. business population and that’s a pretty healthy [...]

Thanks to the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau is just a little busy this year, we won’t be seeing the firm size class numbers for 2007 until later this month. Almost on the heels of that release, somewhere in the middle of the demographics data from the 2007 Economic Census, the 2008 nonemployer numbers [...]

Last month, we took a look at research that examined entrepreneurship and regional economic growth, while using a data set that firmly excluded nonemployer businesses. Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released new research that examines entrepreneurial activity by looking at what percentage of workers in a regional Labor Market Area (LMA) is self-employed. [...]

One of the unfortunate things about the monthly jobs numbers released by the Labor Department is that they only present half the picture. That is why the quarterly Business Employment Dynamics data, which was released last week for the third quarter 2009, can be so very useful. From this latest data release we now know [...]

Economic development types, especially those in chronically depressed areas and in rural areas, will be interested to know that, according to newly released research, entrepreneurial activity is negatively impacted by the presence of large, entrenched companies within the community. So much for “smoke-stack chasing.” The research paper in question, entitled New Business Clustering in U.S. [...]

People in government say, fairly frequently, that America loves its entrepreneurs. If you turn off the rhetoric for a few minutes and look at the actual environment in which we dreamers are expect to operate, however, the actions of those policy makers tells a different story. There are any number of ways in which our [...]

It’s fairly important for entrepreneurial development programs to find some way of measuring client outcomes so that they can say with confidence that what they do accomplishes good things for clients, communities and public welfare programs. That’s particularly true of SBA partner networks because they constantly have to establish to the satisfaction of Congressional appropriators [...]

Now that Congress has taken care of the health insurance issue — at least for the time being — no doubt policy makers will consider themselves free to turn their attention to that other category of employer-provided social safety net: retirement savings. And, according to two reports released last week by the SBA Office of [...]

On the eve of the House vote that finally sent sweeping health care reform legislation to President Obama’s desk, the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE) has released the results of a member survey indicating that lawmakers have been getting it wrong from Day One. For example, while almost eight in ten microbusiness owners (77.6%) [...]

Given all the yelling about ‘jobs, jobs, jobs,’ the SBA Office of Advocacy released a particularly timely report last week, aptly entitled An Analysis of Small Business and Jobs. The paper, authored by Advocacy economist Brian Headd, bills itself as a primer to help policy makers (and anyone else who happens to be interested) “understand [...]