The Contribution of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities to Entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom

This chapter compares the entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspiration of a representative sample of over 38,000 individuals in the United Kingdom. White life-long residents are found to have less awareness of and less favourable attitudes towards entrepreneurship than other ethnic/migrant categories. Those with black ethnic backgrounds appear to exhibit higher entrepreneurial propensity, but this does not translate into significantly higher levels of actual business ownership. Both UK-born regional inmigrants and immigrants are more likely to be high-expectation early-stage entrepreneurs than life-long residents. However, belonging to any of fifteen different ethnic minorities rather than white British appears to have no effect on the propensity to be a high-expectation early-stage entrepreneur.