Nearly a year after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, many of the island’s roughly 44,000 small businesses that haven’t benefited from reconstruction spending are still struggling, Bloomberg News reported. About 2,400 businesses closed in the fourth quarter of 2017, more than double the amount that closed during the same period in 2016, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. In total, 5,000 to 8,000 small businesses may have closed permanently since the storm, estimates Nelson Ramírez, president of the Centro Unido de Detallistas, a small business advocacy group in San Juan. The toll could climb to more than 10,000, he says, if insurers keep dragging their feet, energy costs keep increasing, and large numbers of Puerto Ricans keep relocating to the mainland. Because small employers represent about 80 percent of the private sector workforce, their health is crucial to the economy.
