Tina Highfill

To better track the overall growth and relative contributions of small business in the U.S. economy, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is developing new economic statistics by business size. The paper begins with a description of existing economic statistics for small businesses, including those from the U.S. Small Business Administration, U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Statistics Canada. We then present experimental estimates of 2012–2016 employment, wages, and wages per employee by enterprise size and industry, based on publicly available source data. We find wage and employment growth over the period was slowest for very small enterprises (those with less than 20 employees) and fastest for large enterprises (those with 500 or more employees), although this relationship differs across industries. Additionally, enterprises with 0–99 employees saw wages increase at a slower rate than medium and large enterprises (those employing 100 or more employees), lagging by 1.5 percent. A discussion of the measurement challenges related to developing a full suite of economic statistics for small businesses concludes the paper.

Special district governments are a type of local government that may embody characteristics of both governments and private businesses and are an important source of public services. Given the combined characteristics of special districts and their economic importance, a complete and consistent economic accounting for special districts that operate like businesses – special district enterprises – is important to the relevance and accuracy of the U.S. national accounts. In this paper, we present a preliminary set of economic accounts for special district enterprises using two different approaches for identifying special district enterprises: by unit and by function. Our results suggest that the identification of enterprises by function rather than by unit yields differences in key economic accounting aggregates. Our results also suggest that some functions currently treated as enterprise functions under the U.S. national accounts existing methodology do not fit the SNA criteria for treatment as quasi-corporations. We conclude that identification of enterprises by function may be preferable to identification by unit because the sample selection is more precise. Based on identification by function, measured value-added for enterprises in 2012 is $33.2 billion, of which $16.7 billion reflects compensation and $16.5 billion reflects operating surplus.

This paper presents experimental trade-in-value added statistics estimated from extended supply-use tables (SUTs) for the United States for 2005 and 2012 that account for firm heterogeneity. The tables used to estimate the TiVA statistics extend supply-use tables for the United States by disaggregating the components of supply and use by multinational and other firms. We also present preliminary output from a microdata linking project between the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau on the U.S. semiconductor and other electronic components manufacturing industry to show how different firm characteristics account for heterogeneity within industries in an extended SUT framework. The rise of global value chains has increased the importance of measuring trade on a value added basis and identifying trade by multinational enterprises when analyzing bilateral trade flows. Our experimental results show that imported content of exports as a share of exports varies notably by firm-type within most industries, and that the imported content of exports is concentrated in a few industries, the largest being petroleum manufacturing. Based on these experimental results, most content of exports by firms in goods producing industries is from U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs) and most content of exports in services industries is from non-MNEs. However, domestic value added embodied in inputs from upstream foreign affiliates makes a significant contribution to the content of exports in several industries. We also find that several of the industries where value added content of exports by MNEs is concentrated are also industries in which intrafirm trade in goods is concentrated. Estimates based on our microdata linking project suggest that production patterns by ownership, firm size class, and export intensity each exhibit firm heterogeneity to some extent. The ownership criteria best accounts for heterogeneity in the value added share of production among the three criteria, while firm size class accounts for heterogeneity in the export share of production better than the ownership criteria. However, the three criteria are highly correlated and we make no attempt here to isolate the individual effects of each.