Platform-Enabled Small Business Formation as a Driver of Economic Balance and Inclusion

This paper explores evidence of entrepreneurship and new enterprise formation in the context of concerns regarding an increasing divergence of economic opportunity available to Americans living in more or less advantaged regions of the country. Building on an innovative methodology for ranking U.S. counties along an index of social and economic variables developed by the Economic Innovation Group, we studied the geographic dispersion of net enterprise formation in the U.S. economy in comparison to the eBay Marketplace. We analyze the results in the context of geographic balance and inclusion and report findings that indicate meaningfully more balanced and inclusive growth on the eBay Marketplace than in the overall U.S. economy.