Friday, October 05, 2012

When Entrepreneurship Results in No Jobs

There are few countries that can claim to have a real answer to the creation of employment and this question continues to animate the world's largest economy today. And yet a number of popular approaches and policy stances to the need to expand employment are often based on belief and strong sentiment than on empirical evidence. The common claims are that the provision of loans on preferential terms are sufficient to create new business through new enterprises. A related claim that is quite common is that self-employment is one sure way out of the unemployment problem in both low and high income countries.

Employment is rightly considered one of the major issues in the ongoing presidential campaigns in the United States. Catherine Rampell of the NYT, writes about the difficult employment problem generally but more particularly about the fragmented and small nature of most start-ups in the United States. The nature of the new corporations is that they are creating a smaller number of employees on average and therefore essentially unable to drive strong employment growth. As the piece states, this phenomenon has startling policy implications for those who believe that small firms will be the creators of jobs as they have been.

Whether this change in the structure of the labour markets is permanent or not is subject to confirmation in the future. What is mot certain is that the quest to expand employment cannot be found in the purported silver bullet of entrepreneurship.economies are complex and this works in a way that precludes the ability to push buttons on one end and generate jobs on another.      

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