This year's observance began Sunday.
Small businesses bring jobs to town by twos and threes instead of thousands.
They add to economic output in hundreds or thousands of dollars, not billions. The Economic Census, a branch of the Census Bureau, attempts to sketch the outline every five years, just now releasing the data gathered in 1997. America's companies with fewer than 100 employees provide 52 percent of the nongovernment jobs and contribute 51 percent of the private-sector output. Their numbers are larger than their economic effect. For every company with more than 1,000 employees in Orange County, there are almost a thousand with fewer than five.