Drivers of Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses

创业和小企业对于所有国家和国际发展机构提高经济增长、鼓励创新和促进不同群体融入社会至关重要。英国作为“第一个工业国”的历史对世界范围内的发展理论和政策产生了影响。该项目的数据库和分析将改变人们对1851-1911年英国创业精神的理解，为现代政策提供教训，以及与现代创业精神和经济增长的关系。以前的研究几乎没有关于19世纪和20世纪初企业数量和规模分布的信息。这使得整个经济范围内对企业家精神和商业动态的理解变得困难，与现代模式的关系也无法评估。1851-1911年间，工薪阶层、自营职业者和不同类型企业之间的缴费分配非常不确定(英国国家统计局和其他历史序列的差距表明了这一点)。因此，我们对自19世纪50年代以来整个经济范围内企业家的个人和地理模式、管理变化及其在经济增长中的作用的演变的了解非常有限。许多关于创业精神和小企业发展的广为流传的说法基本上都是未经检验的。这些历史上的差距对国际清算银行、地方政府和促进创业和经济发展的国际机构具有现实意义。该项目旨在利用1851-1911年间可用的人口普查记录，确定英国那些作为雇主、公司董事和自营账户交易员的企业家的人口。这些数据以前没有被用来摘录企业/企业家，因为它们没有电子版本。最近为英国人口普查局大多数人口普查建立的数据库(I-CEM)现在使这一项目变得可行。这是一个“大数据”项目，涉及为大约200-400万个体户和雇用其他人的150,000-400,000名企业主/企业家的每次人口普查开发和分析一个数据库。这将创建第一个公开的关于1851-1911年间英国个体企业主人口的数据，保存在英国数据档案馆。目标是雄心勃勃的，但可行性已经通过使用完整的1881年电子人口普查记录的试点进行了测试。这个试点项目开发了所需的提取算法，并评估了所获得的雇主信息的代表性。该项目将通过以下方面的新发现，促进当前和历史的辩论：对创业的机构和个人支持、不同地理环境的创业繁殖力、与现代创业和增长的关系、按性别划分的参与率、以及对企业创建和增长贡献最大的企业家和地点的特征。它将首次按员工规模、地点、性别、行业组织状况(如有限公司、合伙企业和独资贸易商)和企业家类型对创业率和企业数量进行大规模长期估计。该项目将通过多变量计量经济学估计来估计创业的历史趋势和驱动因素，历史模式如何影响现代创业和增长，以及这对现代政策意味着什么。将通过针对特定用户群体的活动、出版物、网络传播、提供关键统计数据(类似于现代国际清算银行中小企业统计数据)以及不同空间尺度上主要分布模式的地图来传达调查结果。案例研究将丰富量化解释，以帮助吸引用户群体，两个试点将调查人口普查与公司股东和董事记录的整合，并跟踪公司/企业家小组的一段时间。

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.