LAUSR

Abstract The socioeconomic and entrepreneurial characteristics of a group of 68 small (fewer than 120000 persons) U.S. counties exhibit extensive orderliness. There is a geographically-insensitive log-log (power law) relationship between the number of enterprises and enterprise richness (the number of enterprise types) in the counties. Enterprise richness is used as a proxy for productive knowledge, i.e., the explicit and tacit knowledge to produce and deliver things and services. Enterprise richness quantifies the number of times a new business idea is successfully introduced. The numbers of population, enterprises, employees in enterprises, total county employees, and higher-educated persons all scale super-linearly in relation to levels of productive knowledge. Thus, there are significant agglomeration effects associated with increases/decreases of productive knowledge. The ratios between two entrepreneurial types i.e., new and existing entrepreneurs, have been quantified in relation to the size of the counties. Smaller counties have a greater need for new entrepreneurs than for existing entrepreneurs, and the opposite is the case for larger counties. The notion that the level of poverty is related to the level of productive knowledge in countries, led to exploration of the relationship of various characteristics to poverty levels in the selected counties. Poverty is an important moderating factor in the entrepreneurial wellbeing of the 68 counties. The demographic-socioeconomic-entrepreneurial nexus of U.S. counties deserves further research attention.