Thanks to President Obama, Donald J. Trump is about to inherit an economy still on the upswing. The jobless rate for November was the lowest since August 2007 and 15.6 million private sector jobs have been added since early 2010, the government said on Friday.

A report last month by the Kauffman Foundation found a sharp uptick in small business survival rates in the last year. (The 2016 Kauffman Index of Main Street Entrepreneurship measures U.S. entrepreneurship across national, state and metro areas. It captures business activity in all industries and is based on a national sample of roughly 900,000 responses each year and the universe of all employer businesses in the U.S. in a dataset that covers approximately 5 million businesses.)

The index relies on three indicators to measure entrepreneurship:

• The rate of business owners in the economy, calculated as the percentage of adults owning businesses as their main jobs, who are overwhelmingly represented by small business owners.
• The survival rate of firms, calculated as a percentage of the firms that remain in operation throughout their first five years.
• The established small business density, measured as the ratio of established (five years or older) small (fewer than 50 employees) businesses to the total number of firms.

U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that established small businesses represent almost 68 percent of all employer firms in the country.

Some of the results were surprising.  For the first time since the recovery began, Main Street entrepreneurship activity is at higher levels than those recorded before the onset of the Great Recession, the Kauffman Index said. The increase was primarily driven by a jump in business survival rates, which reached a three-decade high of 48.7%, meaning almost half of new businesses are making it to their fifth year of operation.

On the other hand, U.S. small businesses have gotten smaller over the last 20 years. The smallest of those small businesses–companies with fewer than five employees–make up 53.1% of all established small businesses, up from 49.5 percent in 1996.

Among the 25 larger states, the five with the highest Main Street entrepreneurship activity were Minnesota, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Colorado and Pennsylvania. Among the larger states, the rate of businesses surviving through their first five years ranges from 44% in Arizona to 53.3% in Pennsylvania.

The five metros with the highest Main Street entrepreneurship activity were Pittsburgh, Boston, Portland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The first-five-years survival rate of businesses in the 40 largest metros ranges from an estimated 39.9% in Orlando to 54% in Boston.

For more information, visit http://www.kauffman.org/microsites/kauffman-index/reports/main-street