December 1, 2003

Self-Employment Boosting Economic Recovery

The Wall Street Journal has a story today with data showing how the growth in self-employment is boosting the U.S. economy.

Are start-up companies helping to drive the economic recovery? For months, economists who pore over the Department of Labor's employment surveys have suspected as much. That is because for the past 18 months, more and more Americans have been going off to work on their own. Self-employment has increased by 400,000 in the past year alone, according to a monthly survey of American households conducted by the Labor Department. But it has been hard to tell whether these new self-employed workers were really profiting from their ventures, or whether they were just biding their time during a period of painful unemployment.

Now, investment strategist Kenneth Safian says he has found evidence that small enterprises really are playing an important role in the recovery. The evidence is buried in the government's monthly personal-income report, which was released last week. Proprietors' income, which is the income earned by individuals from running their own businesses and from partnerships, is surging. The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that proprietor's income, excluding the farm sector, was up 8.6% from a year earlier. By contrast, the wages and salaries of individuals on corporate payrolls were up just 2.3%.

Proprietor's income covers a broad swath of the economy - everything from larger law firms to one-person construction companies or tech consultants operating out of a home office. Mr. Safian, who is president of Safian Investment Research Inc., based in White Plains, N.Y., says the upshot of the latest trend is that more workers are striking out on their own and earning money doing it. The economy, he says, "is becoming more entrepreneurial."

If that is the case, it would say a lot about the dynamism of an economy that has been through series of shocks in the past three years. It might also help explain why official payroll employment levels have been so depressed in recent months. If more people are striking out on their own, then their job status in some cases wouldn't show up in the government's measure of employment levels at established businesses, which is down 2.4 million since the recession started in March 2001.