cactus contest ii/2008

  

  Small businesses make up 99.7 percent of all United States employers.

   Small businesses create more than 50 percent of the American non-farm private gross domestic product. (GDP)

   Small patenting firms produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.

   The more than 24 million small businesses in the United States are located in every community and neighborhood.

   Small businesses employ 50.1 percent of the United States' non-farm private sector workers.

   Home-based businesses account for 53 percent of all small businesses.

   Small businesses are 97 percent of America's exporters and produce 26 percent of all export value.

   United States saw an estimated 580,865 new small firms with employees start-up in the last year measured.

   There are approximately 4,115,900 minority-owned businesses and 6,492,795 women-owned businesses in the United States, and almost all of them are small businesses.

   The latest figures show that small businesses creates 65 percent or more of America's net new jobs.

New Report from SBA Documents Impact of Small Business on US Economy

In a study partially funded by the SBA Office of Advocacy, small businesses represent 99.7 percent of all firms, create more than half of the private non-farm gross domestic product, and generate 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs.

Additional details include the following: In 2004, there were an estimated 23,974,500 businesses in the United States. Of the 5,683,700 firms with employees, 5,666,600 were small firms (fewer than 500 employees). Newly available data from the Census Bureau show that in 2002 women owned 6,492,795 firms; Blacks owned 1,197,988 firms; Hispanics owned 1,574,159 firms; Asians owned 1,105,329 firms; American Indians and Alaska Natives owned 206,125 firms; and Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders owned 32,299 firms.

Proprietors’ income, a partial measure of small business income, showed strong growth of 7.3 percent in 2004. Business bankruptcies decreased by 2.1 percent, and self-employment increased by 2.2 percent.

Here are a few tips for using the Learning Abroad Center's Scholarships Database:

1.           Strong search keywords include region, country, and city names, organization names and abbreviations, scholarship subjects (i.e. "arts", "business - management", "english - tefl", "humanities", "language", "science - math", or "social science"), words you think might appear in a scholarship's name, description, or eligibility requirements, etc.

2.           Leaving a field blank indicates that you have no preference for the value in that field. However, leaving all search fields blank will return no results.

3.           Some older scholarships in the database might not have data in all the available fields. Therefore, sometimes it might be beneficial to leave a field blank when performing your search. For example, some scholarships have no value in their respective "Special Eligibility" fields, even though an option for the "Special Eligibility" field (i.e. "Minorities", "Students with Disabilities", "University of Minnesota Students", or "Women") might apply to the scholarships. By searching with the "Special Eligibility " field blank, you might find a program without a "Special Eligibility" value that could indeed match your "Special Eligibility" preference.

4.           If you know the exact number of the scholarship you wish to search for, simply enter the number in the "Scholarship Number" field and click "Submit Search".

5.           To view all scholarships in the database, go to Show All Scholarships.

6.           To find out more detailed information on search techniques, go to Advanced Search Techniques