October 14, 2011 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)
Employment in Silicon Valley high-tech businesses, 2000–2009
In the year 2000, a cohort consisting of about 2,600 high-tech businesses born in Silicon Valley added over 27,000 jobs to the local economy of the area centered in and around San Jose, California.
[Chart data]
Between 2000 and 2009, employment growth in various high-tech industries for the cohort ranged from an increase of 61 percent to a loss of all employment in an industry (communications equipment and manufacturing).
More than 46 percent of all high-tech businesses born in 2000 were in the computer systems design industry. Although this industry had the largest total employment in both 2000 and 2009, nearly 7,000 jobs were shed by the industry’s 2000 cohort during that period.
In 2000, of the 7,000 employment births among cohort firms in the internet, telecommunications, and data processing industry, fewer than 1,200 were left in 2009 from surviving firms. This industry, more than any other, was home to many of the e-commerce startups that came to symbolize the excesses of the dot-com boom.
Businesses operating in multiple high-tech industries were the only businesses in the cohort that had, on average, employment growth between 2000 and 2009. These businesses tended to be slightly larger than businesses operating in only a single industry, a factor that could help explain their higher employment growth.
These data are from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages program. To learn more, see “Survival and growth of Silicon Valley high-tech businesses born in 2000” (PDF), by Tian Luo and Amar Mann in the September 2011 issue of the Monthly Labor Review.
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