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Leveling the Playing Field
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Business New Haven
4/6/1998
By: BNH
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With this issue we come to the inescapable conclusion that small business is big - and that its growth is, for the first time, being driven significantly by female entrepreneurs.
This represents a seismic shift in American business - and, indeed, in American life. Just a few short years ago, in 1992, women owned 36 percent of small businesses in the country - an impressive figure, most of us thought at the time.
Those gains in business ownership have continued to accelerate to the extent that, experts predict, females will own fully half of all U.S. small businesses.
As staggering as that realization may be, it would be difficult not to view it as a welcome trend. The full-fledged arrival of women in small-business ownership brings new strengths, new skills and new perspectives to the economic arena.
It might have been predicted (although it wasn't) that the arrival of women as full economic stakeholders would come in the guise of small-business ownership. While female representation on major corporate boards remains distressingly low, businesswomen have asserted themselves in this more egalitarian arena.
In that arena, old-boy connections account for relatively little. Speed and flexibility are the name of the game in identifying new niches and carving out untapped markets. And women are proving they can play it every bit as well as their male counterparts.
And as we head into the new millennium, it's the shape of things to come. As a small business, we're gratified that the vitality companies such as ours and our peers are at last receiving their due. And we welcome the new partners who join us daily, whatever their gender, into the fray.
Power Failure, Failure of Leadership
The legislature's commerce committee decided rather than pass out a electric deregulation bill that would lower electric costs and create a new energy industry in Connecticut, it would instead recommend that the state continue studying electric power deregulation. Legislative leaders claim the legislation may still make it a to vote this session, but Gov. John G. Rowland says the deregulation bill which he had identified as a high priority for Connecticut - especially its manufacturing and industrial base - now has only a 50-50 chance of passage.
Why, when Massachusetts and Rhode Island have already deregulated their electric markets, is Connecticut seeing such a failure of leadership?
The answer is at once simple and complex. While NU and the UI fought deregulation, there was good momentum for passage. It was only last year that both utilities promised rate freezes in exchange for forestalling deregulation.
The bill failed last year, however, as legislators were unable to confront the essential fact that the costs of past mistakes could not simply be wished away. The most obvious of those mistakes were the creation of massively expensive nuclear power plants built by the utility industry working in lockstep with government regulators. Without the risk of the marketplace, neither displayed much concern for the costs to consumers, including businesses.
To make matters worse, poor management on the part of Northeast Utilities and sensational media coverage of its Millstone reactors has generated vast ill will toward NU.
The truth is that the utilities blew it. Certainly, there was plenty of criticism at the time the nuclear plants were constructed, on both environmental and economic grounds, but that's all in the past.
The deregulation model proposed for the state is flawed - but all that really means is that it will take the marketplace a couple more years to fix it. Putting things off isn't going to change anything. And, ironically, it means that the utilities continue to recover costs from their past sins, anyway, under the present regulation structure.
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