Diversity, immigrant entrepreneurship, and regional development in Spain: An institutional approach.

Diversity, immigrant entrepreneurship, and regional development in Spain: An institutional approach

Abstract

Due to the current humanitarian crisis, in which Spain is not the exception, there might be a belief that allowing immigrants to come from developing countries may be harmful to the social order. However, there is growing recognition of the opposite idea. Foreigners, especially those involved in entrepreneurial activities, may and do bring economic development. Drawing on this, we explore whether diversity leads to increase immigrant entrepreneurial activity directly and regional development indirectly. Institutional economics serves as theoretical lenses to analyse how diversity, as a wider socialisation process thanks to immigrants, encourages entrepreneurial activity, which leads to better economic outcomes in host regions. We assess this idea by modelling the process using a 3SLS estimator on a sample of 246 observations from 19 Spanish autonomous communities in the period 2006-2018. The results indicate that migrants from Latin American countries (in case of emerging economies), and European Union (in case of developed countries) have a higher influence on immigrant entrepreneurship, thereby raising economic growth rates. The article closes with a short discussion on the relevance of the findings.

About the speaker

Sebastian Aparicio is a Serra Hunter Associate Professor in the Department of Business at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he is also a Research Fellow in the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation Research and the Centre for University Entrepreneurship. Sebastian is affiliated with Indiana University as a Junior Research Fellow in the Institute for Development Strategies. He serves as a Country Vice-President for Spain at the European Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ECSB), and sits on the Editorial Board of journals such as Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Small Business Economics, and Entrepreneurship Research Journal, among others. Sebastian coordinates the Research Seminars at the Department of Business, and works as a Deputy-Coordinator of the Master in Applied Research in Economics and Business (MAREB-UAB). In the past, he was a Lecturer at UAB and an Assistant Professor at Durham University. Sebastian is mainly interested in the effects of entrepreneurial activity and innovation on economic development under the institutional lenses