How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy?
Small firms:
- Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
- Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
- Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
- Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
- Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
- Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
- Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
- Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
- Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.
Sources (see the Office of Advocacy’s Research and Statistics page):
- U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census and International Trade Admin.
- Advocacy-funded research by Kathryn Kobe, 2007
- CHI Research, 2003
- U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.