David Birch wrote a book in 1979 entitled The Job Generation Process. Despite his considerable accomplishments since then, Birch expects that his epitaph will probably read, rightly or wrongly, "David Birch discovered that small firms create most of the jobs."

In 1979, when Birch published the idea that small businesses create most of the jobs, the reaction was a mixture of shock and disbelief. Large businesses were supposed to dominate the world, weren’t they? "Here was this nerd coming up with the idea that small firms were more important than large ones," says Birch. "The huge corporations began aiming their cannons."

Birch classified businesses in Wild Kingdom terms. The large, publicly traded firms that have shed millions of jobs over the past two decades are elephants. Small Main Street businesses that create jobs when they start up but then grow very little are mice. And fast-growing businesses that start small, then double in size and double again, are the gazelles. For the past 25 years, the most effective job creators have been the gazelles and the mice. And of those, the gazelles have been the prolific: some 350,000 of these fast-growing companies have created as many jobs in the recent past as the mice, which number in the millions.

[abstracted from the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, http://www.sba.gov/ADVO/25ann.html]

• The Job Generation Process: David Birch. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Program on Neighborhood and Regional Change, 1979.
• The Age of the Gazelle: John Case.
• High-Impact Firms - Gazelles Revisited: Zoltan Acs, William Parson and Spencer Tracy
• Gazelles as Job Creators - Assessing the Evidence: Magnus Henrekson and Dan Johansson

1. Is it still true? Do small firms create most of the jobs?
2. What are the ex ante characteristics that separate the gazelles from the mice?
3. Can we identify gazelles in North Carolina today?

Create a policy proposal for Mecklenburg County that will encourage gazelles to grow and create jobs there.

Create a policy proposal for Surry County to do the same thing.

Should their approaches be different in "hunting" gazelles? Explain.