small business

This document serves as a summary of other research materials and provides a series of quick, easy-to-recite facts for an external audience to recognize the importance of small business in the economy.

This report shows that creating firm size data on the dynamic U.S. economy has been difficult. Administrative data include delays for the purposes of capturing births, closures, corporate restructuring, mergers, and spin-offs.

According to the report, small businesses and microenterprises have an important role to play in low- and moderate-income communities. Often they are the engines of growth in these neighborhoods.

This paper shows, based on an empirical study of American entrepreneurs, that spin-offs are indeed a step ahead of firms that do not receive support from a third party company.

The report by the U.S. General Accounting Office recommends that small businesses consider a wide and complex range of factors before investing in foreign patents. The report identifies factors small businesses should consider when deciding whether to obtain patent protection abroad and the steps they should take to improve their patent efforts.

The authors review the policy arguments in favour of assisting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in various areas of their operations. The review suggests that many of the arguments put forward for subsidising SME activities are not economically justified. The authors then study the possibilities offered by networks in helping SMEs deal with the
disadvantages they experience.

According to the report, during fiscal year 2003, nearly $59 million in financing was enabled for the direct benefit of 168 Virginia businesses through the programs of the Virginia Small Business Financing Authority. The report also reviews workforce services, existing business services, the small business incubator program, and other agency activities.

In the first half of the paper, the author analyzes the Initiative of SMEs Guarantee Facility of the European Investment Fund. The second part refers to the Greek experience related to the above EIF Initiatives focusing on the new Institution of SMEs Credit Guarantee Fund.

The Swedish SMEs are very important for the future development of the Baltic Region, according to the author. The paper looks at established financing methods for Swedish SMEs and analyzes the impact of these methods on firm survivability using the Survival Index Value model.

Building on information gathered from the Small Business Economic Indicators report, these profiles provided an overview of the important role small businesses play in each state. They include baseline statistics on each states small business economy-number of firms, small business income, industrial composition, job growth and data on minority- and women-owned businesses.