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Ethnic Business Development: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis and Policy Framework

2003; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00213624.2003.11506644

1946-326X

Gamal Ibrahim, Vaughan Galt,

Family Business Performance and Succession

There has been a growing interest in both Europe and North America in the high rate of self-employment among ethnic minority groups. The evidence indicates that some ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented in self-employment (Razin 1993; Fairlie and Meyer 1996; Clark and Drinkwater 2000). Well-known examples are the South Asians in Britain; the Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese in the USA; and the Turks and North Africans in France (Barrett, Jones, and McEvoy 1996; Bates 1997; Hillmann 1999; Ram and Jones 1998). There are a number of seemingly conflicting explanations given as to why some ethnic groups enter self-employment. These range from economic efficiency explanations to more sociological ones that draw on cultural factors. In this paper we will argue that such polarization of explanations is unnecessary and that, by drawing on the work of old intuitionalists (e.g., Veblen 1898) with their emphasis on path dependency and evolutionary behavior, a more unified, but more complex socio-economic argument can be forwarded to explain the disproportionate presence of ethnic entrepreneurs. The first section of the paper sets out the more cultural explanations. The next section covers orthodox economic explanations of entrepreneurial entry, and this is followed by a section on old institutional explanations. Policy implications are discussed in the final section of the paper, which, given the unequal distribution of entrepreneurs across different ethnic groups, not only considers ways of encouraging entrepreneurship but also possible routes in which this activity might best be concentrated.