Tim Cohen’s piece on entrepreneurship (Business Day, June 14) raised interesting questions. In a world sinking ever deeper into the "new normal" of creeping structural unemployment, amplified by the unprecedented effects of globalism and technology, the subject takes on a significance that’s hard to overstate given the challenges we face in SA. Cohen correctly concludes that there are "different kinds of entrepreneurship, and different types of entrepreneur", but his analysis failed to address other critical aspects. Despite the popular narrative, entrepreneurship finds itself in crisis. To illustrate, consider trends in the US — partly because of its superior data sets, but also because the US remains the most entrepreneur-friendly jurisdiction on earth. Yet despite this America is experiencing: • a multi-decade secular decline in both new business formation and the relative share of gross employment by small businesses (companies with fewer than 250 employees); • a steep secular d...
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