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ARCHIVED—Key Small Business Statistics - July 2011
How many businesses appear and disappear each year?
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Thousands of businesses enter and exit the marketplace throughout the year. Keeping track of these births and deaths is no easy matter. Statistics Canada made available data on SMEs in Canada through the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Data Warehouse (SMEs Data Warehouse).
Figure 2 shows the number of small businesses (those with fewer than 100 employees) that entered and exited the marketplace annually between 2002 and 2007. Over this period, 104 000 new small businesses, on average, were created in Canada each year. There was no clear pattern of business entries over the period. In 2002, there were approximately 90 000 entries, gradually increasing to a peak of over 115 000 in 2005. This figure fell to 97 000 in 2006 before recovering to 110 000 in 2007. The number of exits remained at approximately 86 000 from 2002 to 2004. In the following two years, the number of exits totalled 190 000 and declined to 86 000 in 2007. On a net basis, the average number of entries over the 2002–2007 period was 15 000. Only in 2006 were there more exits than entries, although not by a significant amount.
[Description of Figure 2]Source: Statistics Canada, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Data Warehouse, 2010.
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