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BEHIND AMERICA’S SMALL BUSINESS SUCCESS STORY.

The OECD became latest organisation to hail America as the rich world’s most entrepreneurial economy. Businesses with fewer than 100 people are credited with creating two out of every three of America’s net new jobs. Last year 37% of its venture-capital investments went to start-ups, compared with l2%in Eu­rope. The National Federation of Indepen­dent Businesses (NFIB) boasts that Ameri­ca’s small businesses count as the world’s third-biggest economy in their own right.

But is America winning these plaudits by default? To be deemed a better breeding ground for small businesses than, say, Ger­many (which does not even have a precise word for venture capital) is hardly difficult. It says nothing about how much better America could be; nor about the growing suspicion that American entrepreneurs face an increasingly inhospitable legal and regulatory structure.

Most people’s idea of a successful small American business is a fast-growing Inter­net company, backed by venture capital. Kent Bowen of the Harvard Business School argues that reality is more mun­dane: a small family firm in an established industry, growing at around 15% a year, with that growth financed internally. Many of its bugbears, such as big companies that settle their bills late, are familiar to its peers in Kyoto or Cannes. But not all of them. Small American companies have to deal with litigiousness on a scale that their European and Japanese peers can only laugh about.

Most people assume that big firms an more vulnerable to the excesses of America’s tort system because they are fatter targets for lawyers. But big firms also have the money - and the time - to fight back. Small firms have no such resources. Over half the own ers of small businesses take home less than $50,000 a year in pay: the average court case costs more than $l00.000. No wonder, the boss usually tries to deal with the complaint himself, and will often settle quickly.

Employment-practices liability insurance is already a $l00m-a-year business - even though insurers often cover only legal costs and the rates are extortionate. Law suits are also restricting the freedom of small American firms to hire and fire employees, long one of their chief advantages. Many small firms no longer give references for fear of subsequent lawsuits; many more do not fire anyone without consulting their lawyer first. Hopes for reform look slim. In any case, according to one British-born businessman in New York, most Americans “have no idea that this sort of hassle does not happen anywhere else”.

Small businesses the world over complain about bureaucracy, but the red tape spinning out of Washington is copious and the country’s small businesses, handicapped by a lack of resources, find it disproportionately restrictive.

One particular irritation for small businesses is the tax code, which is riddled with loopholes and exemptions, many of them created by large businesses. In a recent se­ries of Senate hearings, various Internal Revenue Service officials admitted that small businesses such as mom-and-pop shops were easy “audit hits”, because they lack the resources to defend themselves.

 Given all this, why are American small businesses optimistic about their future ? Why are new firms still sprouting across the country? And why is it virtu ally impossible to find an entrepreneur anywhere in America who would rather set up shop anywhere else?

Some of this is due to the country’s booming economy, but there are two other reasons as well. The first is structural. Despite all the lawyers, the HMOs, the increased regulation and so on, America still provides more of the things entrepreneurs want than anywhere else: access to capital to start businesses (California and Massachusetts alone have bigger venture-capital industries than the whole of Europe); a relatively flexible labour market that allows, you to hire and fire workers more easily than elsewhere; a legal system that does not stigmatise you if you fail; and a tax system that allows you to keep most of the spoils if the business succeeds.

The second reason is that American entrepreneurialism seems more rooted in culture than structures. As Paul Morin of the Wharton School of Business points out there is no obvious shortage of capital in Europe or Japan: it just does not go into the same sort of risky endeavours.

VOCABULARY