From the StartupJournal.com: What's the truth behind supposed studies that show about 80% or so of small businesses fail within their first five years? While there is no clear evidence to back up those numbers, the bad news is, they may be true. A close up look look at this 'statistic'.

• Complete Report from the StartupJournal.com

The article reports that:

Let's start with what we do know. Roughly half of all new businesses with employees survive four years, and even those that shut down aren't necessarily failures. Amy Knaup, a researcher at the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 66% of the 212,182 employer businesses started in the second quarter of 1998 lasted two years, and 44% survived four years. 

But there is a major shortcoming to these numbers: These studies track only businesses with employees — not nonemployers, such as the next-door neighbor running an eBay store from a computer in her basement.  Nonemployers, which account for a whopping three-quarters of all U.S. businesses, are much harder to research because they don't file much information about their operations with the government.

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