McKinsey Global Institute

Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, employing nearly 60% of workers and contributing almost 40% to the nation's value-added output. Accounting for 34,752,434 companies, 99.9% of all American companies are small businesses. However, micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the U.S. are only half as productive as large companies, a stark contrast to the 60% productivity ratio seen in other advanced economies, according to research by my colleagues at the McKinsey Global Institute. This gap in productivity is equivalent to 5.4% of GDP, making it crucial to boost U.S. competitiveness in a shifting global market, writes Kweilin Ellingrud in Forbes.

What’s often missing from the conversation about getting to net-zero emissions is a recognition of the difficulty in transforming the complex physical assets underlying our current energy system — a system that has been optimized over centuries to deliver high performance, that is deeply embedded in the global economy, and that serves billions of people. McKinsey Global Institute research has identified 25 significant technology and infrastructure challenges that need to be overcome. These relate not only to the development and deployment of low-emissions technologies, but also to the supply chains and underlying infrastructure that need to be transformed, write Mekala Krishnan, Chris Bradley, Humayun Tai, and Tiago Devesa in Harvard Business Review.