Search results

This chapter is concerned with access to bank finance by ethnic minority businesses (EMBs) in the U.K., focusing particularly on the process of decision-making by bank managers with respect to credit applications by entrepreneurs from ethnic minority groups. The results reported in this chapter are taken from a major U.K. study that included two large scale surveys of EMB owners and a white control group, case studies with ethnic minority entrepreneurs and a programme of interviews with business support agencies. Whilst referring to other evidence, this chapter focuses on the findings from a series of interviews with bank representatives. The U.K. study was funded by the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), the Bank of England and the Small Business Service and supported by the Commission for Racial Equality.

Leading off the book, and the first paper in this section, is, “The Ethnic Ownership Economy” by Ivan Light. This survey paper hardly needs an introduction, because the author is one of the foremost scholars in the field of ethnic economics and entrepreneurship. Ivan Light can be argued to be one of the founders of fields concerned with ethnicity on the strength of his groundbreaking early study Ethnic Enterprise in America (1972). Over the subsequent years he has remained on the cutting edge of research, and the survey paper included here clearly reflects that fact. In this paper, the author reviews and summarizes a significant body of sociological research concerning ethnic economies. He offers three challenges for future research: the first is to examine how the ethnic or immigrant entrepreneurs differ from non-immigrant entrepreneurs, the second is to investigate how immigrants tend to differ in the bundle of resources when compared to their indigenous counterparts, and the third is to study how in multi-ethnic societies non-immigrant entrepreneurs and immigrant/ethnic minority entrepreneurs operate out of social networks with minimal overlap.