Ever wonder how many companies are publicly traded? Turns out there has been a steady decline in the number of public companies since 1997. See below for a historical count of publicly listed companies on the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ exchanges.
These results include corporations and real-estate investment trusts (REITs) with common share classes from the three major American historical exchanges.
Quickly scanning the data, you'll see that the number of publicly traded companies has never been all that high. The number peaked in 1997 around 8,000 public companies. Since then we've seen steady decline to around 5,000. You'll also notice a large jump in the data around 1972. This is when the NASDAQ exchange was formed. The introduction of the NASDAQ doubled the number of public companies.
I gathered this data from CRSP's (Center for Research in Security Prices) monthly stock file and used Python to sort the data accordingly. Hope you enjoy!