In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.
U.S. business data are used broadly, providing the building blocks for key national-as well as regional and local-statistics measuring aggregate income and output, employment, investment, prices, and productivity. Beyond aggregate statistics, individual- and firm-level data are used for a wide range of microanalyses by academic researchers and by policy makers. In the United States, data collection and production efforts are conducted by a decentralized system of statistical agencies. This apparatus yields an extensive array of data that, particularly when made available in the form of microdata, provides an unparalleled resource for policy analysis and research on social issues and for the production of economic statistics. However, the decentralized nature of the statistical system also creates challenges to efficient data collection, to containment of respondent burden, and to maintaining consistency of terms and units of measurement. It is these challenges that raise to paramount importance the practice of effective data sharing among the statistical agencies. With this as the backdrop, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) asked the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies to convene a workshop to discuss interagency business data sharing. The workshop was held October 21, 2005. This report is a summary of the discussions of that workshop. The workshop focused on the benefits of data sharing to two groups of stakeholders: the statistical agencies themselves and downstream data users. Presenters were asked to highlight untapped opportunities for productive data sharing that cannot yet be exploited because of regulatory or legislative constraints. The most prominently discussed example was that of tax data needed to reconcile the two primary business lists use by the statistical agencies.
SMEs play an important role for economic growth and social inclusion in Indonesia. Based on data from the Ministry of Co-operatives and SMEs, Indonesian SMEs account for nearly 97% of domestic employment and for 56% of total business investment.