Can Entrepreneurs Fix The Job Loss Problem?

Small Business Trends:

Last month was a very bad month for jobs; the economy lost 533,000 jobs, the worst monthly decline since 1974.

People often talk about the importance of entrepreneurs as job creators in this country. So I got to thinking: how much additional entrepreneurial activity would have been necessary to avoid these job losses? The answer, it turns out, is a lot.

In an average month, new employer businesses create about 38 percent as many new jobs as we lost in November 2008. So, if we could figure out a way to have increased new employer businesses by 2.64 times their average monthly rate during November 2008, we could have offset the month’s job losses.

But, we would probably need additional entrepreneurial activity to do this. A variety of estimates from the Census Bureau and other places indicate that only about one-in-four new businesses is an employer business. So in an average month last year, 212,367 new businesses were created to generate the 201,478 new jobs. That means that to create enough jobs to replace the 533,000 jobs lost in November, we would have needed approximately 561,033 new business starts. That’s a lot of entrepreneurial effort.

But we’re not finished yet. To create this number of start-ups, we need many more people trying to become entrepreneurs. Only about one-in-three people who begin the process of starting a business actually create a business within seven years. So, we would have needed about 1.68 million people to have initiated the start-up process some time before November 2008 to have replaced the jobs lost during the month of November. That’s huge amount of entrepreneurial effort.

Photo by tatlici.

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