Development of Business Data: Tracking Firm Counts, Growth, and Turnover by Size of Firms

摘要

Just over a few decades ago, data on U.S. industries were mainly focused on agriculture and manufacturing; thus, comprehensive data on small business were not available. Tremendous efforts were undertaken by individuals and organizations to obtain the extremely valuable data by firm size that are taken for granted today. Documentation was needed to chronicle the creation of these data sources so that users could understand the strengths and weaknesses of the data and so that later efforts to produce new data sources could benefit from the previous experience. Creating firm size data on the dynamic U.S. economy has been difficult. Administrative data involve delays for the purposes of capturing births, closures, corporate restructuring, mergers and spin-offs. Within the last quarter century, great progress has been made by government data agencies in overcoming the challenges to develop dynamic firm size data that will allow policymakers and academics to understand the role of new and small businesses in the U.S. economy.