Drivers of Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Entrepreneurship and small businesses are of critical importance to all countries and international development agencies to improve economic growth, encourage innovation, and facilitate inclusion of different groups in societies. The history of Britain as the 'First Industrial Nation' is influential on development theory and policy worldwide. This project's database and analysis will transform understanding of entrepreneurship in Britain over 1851-1911, lessons for modern policies, and relations to modern entrepreneurship and economic growth.Previous research yields little information on business numbers and size-distribution in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This makes economy-wide understanding of entrepreneurship and business dynamics difficult, and relation to modern patterns impossible to assess. The division of contributions between wages earners, self-employment, and businesses of different types of business over 1851-1911 are highly uncertain (as indicated by gaps in ONS and other historical series). As a result, we have very limited understanding of economy-wide evolution since the 1850s of individual and geographical patterns of entrepreneurs, managerial change, and their role in economic growth. Many widespread claims about entrepreneurship and small business development over time are basically untested. These historical gaps have current relevance to BIS, local government and international agencies that promote entrepreneurship and economic development. This project aims to identify the population in Britain of those entrepreneurs who were employers, company directors, and self-employed own account traders using available census records over 1851-1911. These data have not previously been used to extract businesses/entrepreneurs because they have not been available electronically. The recent creation of a database (I-CeM) for most censuses at UKDA now makes this project feasible. This is a 'Big Data' project involving the development and analysis of a database for each census of approximately 2-4 million self-employed individuals and 150,000-400,000 business owners/entrepreneurs that employ others. This will create the first publically available data on the population of individual business proprietors in Britain over 1851-1911, to be deposited at the UK Data Archive.The objectives are ambitious, but feasibility has been tested through a pilot using the full 1881 e-Census records. This pilot developed the extraction algorithm required and assessed the representativeness of the employer information obtained.The project will contribute to both current and historical debates through new findings on institutional and personal supports to entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial fertility of different geographical environments, the relation to modern entrepreneurship and growth, gendered participation rates, and the characteristics of entrepreneurs and locations that contribute most to enterprise creation and growth. It will give the first large-scale long-term estimates of entrepreneurship rates and business numbers by employee size, location, gender, sector organisational status (as Ltd. Cos., partnerships and sole traders), and types of entrepreneur. The project will estimate historical trends and drivers of entrepreneurship through multivariate econometric estimation, how the historical patterns influence modern entrepreneurship and growth, and what this means for modern policy. Findings will be communicated through events aimed at specific user groups, publications, web-dissemination, provision of key statistics (akin to modern BIS SME Statistics), and maps of the main distribution patterns at different spatial scales. Case studies will enrich quantitative interpretations to help engage user groups, and two pilots will investigate integration of census with company records on shareholders & directors, and track panels of firms/entrepreneurs over time.