Advocacy Paper Looks Ahead For Small Biz
Oct 19th, 2008 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: ResearchLast week, the Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy released a working paper with the highly descriptive title “Looking Ahead: Opportunities and Challenges for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Owners,” by Advocacy Chief Economist and Director of Research Chad Moutray. In the paper, Moutray identifies five challenges and five opportunities for small businesses that could be impacted by the policy initiatives pursued by the next administration.
While no one is likely to quibble with the content of the lists, they bring up many questions when viewed from the microbusiness perspective. What impact, for example, will retiring Boomers who start new microbusinesses have on the labor market? What about the need to balance the policy needs of the labor market versus those of the self-employed? What is better for the economy, more jobs or more small businesses? Or is it an either/or issue? When it comes to jobs, the more small businesses there are, the more jobs there will be — including self-created jobs. All things considered, it may be that the most important current economic trend is the push toward self-employment. In that case, addressing the specific challenges and opportunities facing the nonemployer segment of the business population may be the most far-reaching set of policy decisions the incoming administration will — or will not — make.
[...] Council), The Entrepreneurial Mind (from my friend Jeff Cornwall of Belmont University), Microbusiness News Briefs (from Dawn Rivers Baker), and the Washington Post’s Small Business [...]