Migrant entrepreneurship, economic activity and export performance: mapping the Danish trends

Abstract : Recent studies on transnational entrepreneurship suggest that migrant entrepreneur plays an increasingly significant role as sources of economic activities and especially export revenue. The literature is, however, biased on the US experience, lacks a comparative perspective between migrants and non-migrants and is primarily anecdotal in nature. This paper aims to reduce this gap by mapping the recent changes in the role of migrant entrepreneurs as a source of increased economic activity and export revenue in the Danish context and thereby linking the challenges stemming from the transnational entrepreneurship literature to the immigration and internationalisation of entrepreneurship literature. Entrepreneurial economic activity in this paper is proxied by the changing share of self-owned firms across ethic categories. Export revenue is proxied by the number of firms in the different ethnic categories with exports. The Danish context provides unique data allowing for a comparison across migrants and non-migrants, across sectors and across time. The paper reveals that migrants play a decreasing role as sources of economic activity and export revenue and thus fails to provide support for the insights put forward by the transnational entrepreneurship literature. The findings suggest that the more ‘negative’ stance of the immigrations literature seems most adequate.