Satellite Accounts - General

There is no universal definition for “small business.” While number of employees is a popular metric, many small business statistics also use revenue, income, assets, or a combination of these characteristics to classify businesses by size (U.S. Census Bureau 2020; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2018; Bandhiri and others 2019). In this paper, we use Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data categorized by firm-level receipts to estimate wages and gross output by business size, industry, and legal form of organization for 1998–2003. These statistics provide an alternative for understanding small business statistics compared to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) previous estimates of wages and gross output that use enterprise-level employment to classify business sizes (Highfill and Strassner 2017; Highfill and others 2020). Our break out of estimates by legal form of organization, including corporations, partnerships, and sole proprietors, provides an additional layer of detail to better understand the composition of small businesses.

This paper presents newly released estimates of wages, employment, and gross output by industry and enterprise size for 2012 through 2017. These estimates expand on previous U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates by enterprise size in two ways. First, we increased the number of size class groupings from five to eight. Specifically, we split the small businesses category (less than 100 employees) into four subcategories: very small (0–9 employees), small 1 (10–19 employees), small 2 (20–49 employees), and small 3 (50–99 employees). We also expanded the level of detail for large businesses, splitting this category into three subcategories: large 1 (500– 999 employees), large 2 (1,000–4,999 employees), and very large (5,000 or more employees). Second, we expanded the industry detail from about 20 sectors, or 2-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes, to 63 industries, aligning with 3-digit NAICS codes. The full set of estimates is available on BEA's small business website.

On December 5, 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released, for the first time, prototype estimates from the new Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA). In this satellite account, we used an input-output (I-O) framework to conduct an in-depth analysis of the arts and cultural sector's contributions to current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP).

Culture can be defined in a variety of ways to include language, traditions, beliefs, and values. For this new account, we defined arts and cultural production to be largely consistent with definitions used by the United Nations and the European Union. The I-O framework provides the necessary tools to identify and then estimate the value of the "creative chain" associated with arts and cultural production. This chain captures the economic value as we move from the creation of a cultural product (composing a symphony) to its production (the performance being recorded in a studio), then the distribution (by various modes), and finally the consumption (by the listener). In this paper, we explore the processes and methods used to identify and estimate the value of arts and cultural production, including key findings that enable us to quantify the impact of arts and culture on GDP for the first time.