The 2008 U.S. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report was released this week from Babson and Baruch Colleges.  Showing significantly different trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data which was included for the U.S. in the report from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which I highlighted last week, GEM found increasing trends in "total entrepreneurial activity" in 2008.

For those of you not familiar with GEM, it is collected through a household survey in participating countries on activities related to nascent entrepreneurship - people in the process of starting a business - and people running young businesses.  In that sense, GEM is probably closest in measurement concepts to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (KIEA).  GEM has the advantage of explicitly asking about activities related to nascent entrepreneurship while the KIEA takes advantage of a large-scale government survey to look at transitions from being employed by someone else to being self-employed or a business owner.  And while GEM reports to have a large enough sample size to disaggregate different types of growth trajectories, I don't believe it is really possible with a sample size of 2,000 for the whole United States.  Perhaps if they had a sample size which was twice its current size. 

It used to be that GEM was one of the first indicators to the hit the presses, making it of particular interest to the policy community since official statistics have historically been laggards.  But that is no longer the case.  Indeed, besides the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity and the OECD reports, I know that the Census Bureau is getting very close to releasing its updated Business Dynamics Series through 2008 and the NETS database has 2008 data out (I'll be posting on that more in the next couple of days).  If GEM loses its timeliness factor and there continue to be concerns on the squishiness of the data it collects, then I fear the last legs of this effort might come off.  It is an effort with many merits, which is why we were involved as a funder for many years - don't get me wrong.  Being able to buy time on omnibus surveys can be very economical and as such I still know many researchers who utilize this function.