EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Measuring the Small Business Economy

Tina Highfill, Richard Cao, Richard Schwinn, Richard Prisinzano and Danny Leung

BEA Working Papers from Bureau of Economic Analysis

Abstract: To better track the overall growth and relative contributions of small business in the U.S. economy, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is developing new economic statistics by business size. The paper begins with a description of existing economic statistics for small businesses, including those from the U.S. Small Business Administration, U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Statistics Canada. We then present experimental estimates of 2012–2016 employment, wages, and wages per employee by enterprise size and industry, based on publicly available source data. We find wage and employment growth over the period was slowest for very small enterprises (those with less than 20 employees) and fastest for large enterprises (those with 500 or more employees), although this relationship differs across industries. Additionally, enterprises with 0–99 employees saw wages increase at a slower rate than medium and large enterprises (those employing 100 or more employees), lagging by 1.5 percent. A discussion of the measurement challenges related to developing a full suite of economic statistics for small businesses concludes the paper.

JEL-codes: A10 E01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bea.gov/system/files/papers/BEA-WP2020-4_0.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bea:wpaper:0173

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BEA Working Papers from Bureau of Economic Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Batch (andrea.batch@bea.gov).

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:bea:wpaper:0173