Small businesses and entrepreneurship

Few would doubt that the US is an extremely entrepreneurial place, but we frequently confuse entrepreneurial dynamism with self-employment and small enterprise. The Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research published a comparative report on this issue and its data shows that, contrary to popular belief, the US ranks close to the bottom in terms of the number of people employed in these small enterprises. While the CEPR think tank is somewhat left-of-center (or perhaps mainstream academic), their data is from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a broadly neo-liberal inter-governmental organization.