[cwan]

He's not saying that his entire critique was wrong - his attempt to show that healthcare wasn't the reason was "thus wrong". This isn't to say that the authors' attempt to show causation was true either. But, fortunately we do have better critiques here (and critiques where one of the authors of the CEPR attempts to respond to in the second and third links):

(1) http://ipeatunc.blogspot.com/2009/08/entrepreneurship-in-oec... (2) http://ipeatunc.blogspot.com/2009/08/entrepreneurship-and-he... (3) http://ipeatunc.blogspot.com/2009/08/entrepreneurship-and-he...

To summarize - Scott Shane of Case Western studies states as follows:

"If you compare health care’s portion of G.D.P., as measured by the World Bank, with the self-employment rate across the 21 O.E.C.D. countries in the C.E.P.R. study, you will find that the correlation is only -0.19, which statistically speaking, cannot be considered different from zero."

"I know that everyone is focused right now on the health care debate, which is great. But we can’t just say that the absence of universal health care influences the size of our small-business sector. It’s certainly possible that national differences in health care affect national differences in self-employment and small-business generation in some way."

"But we have to show some evidence of those effects."