Locally Owned: Do Local Business Ownership and Size Matter for Local Economic Well-being?

Anil Rupasingha

After many years of fruitless industrial recruitment and redundant tax breaks for corporations, communities are looking for new strategies to attract stable and responsible capital. In a recently released paper, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta explores the potential of locally owned businesses to contribute to economic growth and examines the relationship between local entrepreneurship and county economic performance. Author Anil Rupasingha finds that employment provided by resident-owned businesses is positively associated with county income and employment growth and inversely correlated with change in poverty. Furthermore, this paper shows that smaller locally owned businesses contribute more to local economic performance than medium- and large-scale locally owned businesses</h4>

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