New business formation and productivity
Why do we need new firms? How important is business creation for employment and productivity? How has the coronavirus pandemic affected the churning of businesses? In this episode of Productivity Puzzles, we discuss business dynamism, which is about the birth, growth and decline of businesses, also called churning. The evidence shows that churning is good for the creation of new jobs, for providing opportunities for firm, industries and regions to invest and grow, and a key driver of productivity.
Our guests
- Anthony Impey, CEO of Be The Business, an independent not-for-profit organisation helping small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) boost their performance
- Clare Elsby, Head of People and Culture at Elsby & Co, an accountancy firm specialised in the SME market.
- Jakob Schneebacher from the Office for National Statistics
Productivity Puzzles is sponsored by Capita and brought to you by The Productivity Institute, a research body involving nine academic institutions across the UK, eight Regional Productivity Forums throughout the nation, and a national independent Productivity Commission to advise policy makers at all levels of government.
Publications mentioned in the podcast
- Spotlight on Innovation, FSB Policy Report July 2018 How Government can unlock small business productivity
- ONS: Firm-level labour productivity measures from the Annual Business Survey, UK: 1998 to 2019
For more information on the topic
- ONS, Business demography, UK: 2020; Change in the number of UK businesses broken down by district and industry, 18 November 2021.
- A. Duncan et al., Trough to Boom: UK firm creation during the COVID-19 pandemic, NIESR, May 2021
- B. Nasbitt, Firm Creation, Geography and Productivity, in Covid-19 and Productivity: Impact and Implications, Section 7, pp. 88-105