The number of women and elderly people preparing to start new businesses has been rising amid the aging of the population and consequent decrease in the number of small and midsize companies as their owners retire, a recent government report says.
The annual white paper by the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency says there were more women in 2002 preparing to start new businesses than in the asset-inflated bubble economy period up until the early 1990s, and that 19.9 percent of company founders were age 60 or over, up from 15.6 percent in 1997.
About two-thirds of people 65 or older starting a business in 2002 chose the service sector. In the real estate industry, 65.2 percent of entrepreneurs were 60 or older, many of them landlords.