In 1979, an MIT report upended economic orthodoxy by arguing that small firms, not corporate giants, created most new jobs. It made its author’s name.
Fifteen years later, he corrected himself. The engine wasn’t small firms. It was fast-growing ones. David Birch called them gazelles — depending on the period and definition applied, somewhere around 3–4% of firms, responsible for the large majority of net job creation.
That insight is no longer a provocation. It is built into official statistics. The Eurostat-OECD Manual on Business Demography Statistics formally defines high-growth enterprises and treats gazelles as their young subset — a measured category, tracked across countries.
