The Demongraphic and Economic Context of Business Development - Term Paper Example

Table I, based on the most recently available census figures, presents a broad outline of the size and employment status of Britain's ethnic minorities. It shows that contrary to many popular perceptions of "swamping", ethnic minorities, even when considered collectively, are still only a small fraction, 5.5 percent, of the British population and of the more narrowly defined ethnic communities, only Indians exceed 1 percent of the total population. With regard to unemployment rates, there is a wide gulf between whites and ethnic minorities, with the latter consistently disadvantaged, except in the case of Chinese men, the gulf being most pronounced for black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men, whose employment status continues to reflect their initial incorporation into the British economy as replacement labor in low-level occupations (Ohri and Faruqi, 1988).

In conjunction with the dependency ratios and other indicators such as incomes (Leslie et al., 1998), the unemployment figures confirm that, for the most part, Britain's ethnic minorities remain substantially marginalized economically (Barrett et al., 2001). Many scholars believe that this results largely from a combination of deindustrialization and racism (Brah, 1996). Industries such as textiles and engineering, to which immigrants had been recruited, dispensed with their services when competitive pressures enforced downsizing.

Table I also shows distinctive self-employment rates, in which ethnic minorities contrast strongly with whites, though this time in two directions, with South Asians and Chinese strikingly over-represented in self-employment and black groups equally under-represented. The self-employed with employees category is thought by Owen (1997) to be the better indicator of business activity because many of those without employees are only nominally self-employed as a cost reduction tactic in relation to tax and social security contributions.

Whatever the truth of this judgment, and it probably differs from sector to sector, the relative positions of the broad ethnic categories are the same: South Asians highest; then Chinese and others; then whites; and finally, the black group.