In the US, small businesses (fewer than five hundred employees) account for more than half the non-farm, private GDP and around half the private sector employment. Regarding small business, the top job provider.is those with fewer than ten employees, and those with ten or more but fewer than twenty employees comes in as the second, and those with twenty or more but fewer than one hundred employees comes in as the third (interpolation of data from the following references). The most recent data shows firms with fewer than twenty employees account for slightly more than 18% of the employment.
According to “The Family Business Review,” “There are approximately seventeen million sole-proprietorship in the US. It can be argued that a sole-proprietorship (an unincorporated business owned by a single person) is a type of family business” and “there are twenty-two million small businesses (fewer than five hundred employees) in the US and approximately 14,000 big businesses.”
Also, it has been found that small businesses created the most new jobs in communities, “In 1979, David Birch published the first empirical evidence that small firms (fewer than 100 employees) created the most new jobs”, and Edmiston claimed that “perhaps the greatest generator of interest in entrepreneurship and small business is the widely held belief that small businesses in the United States create most new jobs.
The evidence suggests that small businesses indeed create a substantial majority of net new jobs in an average year.” Local businesses provide competition to each other and also challenge corporate giants. Of the 5,369,068 employer firms in 1995, 78.8 percent had fewer than ten employees, and 99.7 percent had fewer than five hundred employees.
