do.ki
04.05.06, 10:59
Wklejka z Wall Street Journal:
During two decades in which the United States has created 30 million net new
jobs, Europe has failed to add a single additional position to its work
force. That's the most alarming economic fact out of Europe today. But fear
not, people of Europe: While there are lessons to be learned from the U.S.,
this is not a call to adopt the American system wholesale.
To their credit, European policy makers have correctly identified the cause
of this gap: an entrepreneurial deficiency. In contrast to Americans,
Europeans are not starting and building enough small and medium-size
businesses. For nearly three decades in the U.S., the smallest firms have
accounted for almost all net job creation. The U.S. new business start-up
rate has held steady over this period, between 10% and 15% of all firms.
Meanwhile, the already anemic average start-up rate in the European Union has
decreased. Simply put, over more than 20 years, recent start-ups and rapidly
growing small businesses in the U.S. have more than made up for lost jobs in
America's shrinking big companies. Three-quarters of the Fortune 100
companies last year did not exist on the 1980 list. But without a vibrant
entrepreneurial sector, Europe has had similar big-company job loss as the
U.S. without offsetting robust job gains in its small and medium-size
enterprises.
Yet the EU has virtually nullified the benefit of identifying its problem by
getting the remedy all wrong. The much-discussed Lisbon Agenda is Brussels'
attempt to address the bloc's entrepreneurial deficiency. It calls for giving
preferences in bank financing, providing technical assistance and targeting
resources to small and medium-size enterprises deemed promising. These
strategies reflected, at least, that EU officials were coming to terms with
an epochal change in the global economy