Student-friendly and international in scope and relevance, this book provides an accessible introduction to the economics of small business for those with little knowledge of economics. Economics, alongside other disciplines and interacting with them, has some important insights to offer and it is in this context that The Economics of Small Firms examines the formation, survival, growth and financing of small businesses, spatial variations in business formation, the economic role of small businesses, and key policy issues. This informative text is an essential purchase for anybody studying business and management who is eager for an easy-to-use and engaging overview of economics, entrepreneurship and small business.

Is small still beautiful? The recent economic and financial crisis has shown that developed countries in which firms are smaller suffered the biggest GDP plunges. Today, economic growth depends more than in the past on sound and well-organized firms, which means more innovation, a better educated labor force, higher likelihood of access to financial resources and efficient investments. This does not mean the end of small-sized firms, but that they need to be different from the way they were in the past. This book provides an international perspective on analyses and policy recommendations for how small businesses can reinforce their role in modern economies.

This book provides an international perspective on small business, and includes many useful pedagogical features such as questions for discussion, international case studies and empirical research.

This survey reviews research on the economics of small business, introducing key concepts for the understanding of the research, including some basic microeconomics, distribution functions, and concepts of entrepreneurship. Accessible to readers with elementary knowledge of economics and probability, the book is suitable as a text for an undergraduate course in the economics of small business. It also covers the economics of organization, the role of the family in small business, human capital and nonpecuniary motivation, together with the relationship of small business to entrepreneurship and growth. Public policy toward small business is discussed with an emphasis on the United States, together with comparisons and contrasts of many other countries.

Are Small Firms Important? Their Role and Impact proposes and supports the claim that small firms make two indispensable contributions to the economy. First, they are an integral part of the renewal process that pervades market economies. New and small firms play a crucial role in experimentation and innovation that leads to technological change, productivity and economic growth. Second, small firms are the essential mechanism by which millions enter the economic and social mainstream of American society. The public policy implications for sustained economic growth and social well-being is the continued high-level creation of new and small firms by all segments of society. It should be the role of government policy to facilitate that process by eliminating entry barriers, lowering transaction costs, and minimizing regulation.

In this extended and novel entrepreneurial analysis of small firm inception and growth, a leading authority in the field develops a new kind of ‘micro-micro’ analysis, applying rigorous methods from economics, accounting and finance to gain a deeper understanding of micro-firms, examining performance, hierarchy, capital structure, monitoring and control, flexibility, innovation, and information systems.

This book presents a collection of papers which examine the evolution of small and medium enterprises (hereafter SMEs) in East Asia over the past quarter century or so. East Asia is of interest because this region has experienced, on average, the highest economic growth rates in the world during this period. This has been accompanied by dramatic transformations in sectoral output and employment, in patterns of domestic and international trade and in demographic flows within countries. It is of interest to see to what extent these transformations have affected, or have been influenced in turn by, industrial structure as reflected in the evolution of small firms. At the same time, not all countries in East Asia have grown at similar rates nor has there been uniformity in public policies across the region. So there is a background of diversity in both performance and policy. How smaller firms have coped with the different policy environments and patterns of economic transformation that have characterized the region in the recent past could be potential importance to the formulation of public policy in other developing countries. Small firms are important instruments for economic development. This book examines the factors that influence their evolution and performance.

First published in 1973, this title examines the development patterns of small businesses. It considers why people found firms; the factors that contribute to entrepreneurial success; problems of management succession and inheritance; the strengths and weaknesses of family firms; the reasons why small firms are taken over; and the social, economic and managerial context of their growth, decline, and revival. Based on a survey of sixty-four firms, each employing fewer than five hundred people, in engineering, hosiery, and knitwear, and on the records of 370 similar organisations, a striking gap in performance and management attitudes emerges as between dynamic, mostly founder-run firms and stagnant, mostly inherited ones. Where many books are either minutely specialised or highly abstract and over-generalised, Jonathan Boswell’s work is practical and diagnostic, probing the inner recesses of the small firm sector. With particular relevance to the difficulties faced by entrepreneurs in today’s economic environment, this title advances selective measures to deal with old firms and inheritance, and a wide range of policies to encourage new entrepreneurship.