Entrepreneurship is flourishing in rural parts of the US as reported at the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship.
“Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City have been working for some time to develop new ways to track rural entrepreneurship activity. A recent article in The Main Street Economist, by Kansas City Fed researcher Sarah Low, summarizes some of this work. Low argues that understanding regional entrepreneurial activity requires that we measure both the breadth and depth of entrepreneurial activity. Breadth is measured by a region’s ratio of self-employment to total employment; depth can be measured by both average self-employed income and the ratio of self-employed income to receipts. Low further notes that rural America typically has high breadth and low depth of entrepreneurship. In other words, rural regions have many entrepreneurs, but they are not as engaged in high-value-added activities as their urban counterparts.”
What would be interesting is to apply this same approach to all markets. This might help support the premise that the household employment figures are better measures of the real state of the economy right now. It seems that we have a burst of entrepreneurship even in urban markets that Low’s measure of breadth might better assess than our traditional measures of employment and entrepreneurial activity.
The full report of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank can be found here.
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