What’s causing the decline?

Many economists point out that big businesses have been getting even bigger, sucking up resources and potential customers from their smaller competitors. Existing companies opened 50 percent more locations in 2011 than they did in 1978. Forty years ago, about 80 percent of “new establishments” were startups, compared with about 60 percent today, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. This could cause problems for the economy down the road. Small businesses have traditionally been the country’s main job creators, accounting for more than 60 percent of net new jobs in the private sector over the past two decades. But that’s changing. The number of new jobs created by companies less than one year old peaked at 4.7 million jobs in 1999, during the height of the dot-com boom, and fell to 3 million in 2015. “The bigger guys are creating a lot of jobs,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “We’re not getting the same juice from smaller companies and startups.”