You may have heard that Illinois is among the top 10 states nationally in business startups for 2021, with nearly 200,000 businesses formed last year. That’s up from 170,400 in 2020. And 2020 was also a very good year.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker took credit for this positive development, declaring the state to be “back, and open for business” and touting some of his pet economic projects.
The governor’s triumphant recent statement, which claimed Illinois was sixth in the nation when it came to the number of 2021 startups, omitted any reference to the flip side of business startups: business failures. Unfortunately, a lot of Illinois businesses went bust in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, though we don’t have a figure comparable to the U.S. Census Bureau count of “business applications” that Pritzker equated with startups (which is only a rough approximation, at that).
