A level playing field for migrant entrepreneurs? The legal and policy landscape across EU and OECD countries

Abstract

Migrant entrepreneurship has been recognized as a form of integration in the country of destination and a viable alternative of decent and sustainable employment for migrants.Laws and policies can create barriers or support migrants who start a business in the country of destination. Despite their importance, these laws and policies have received scant attention from academic scholarship. By applying the

Regulation of migrant entrepreneurship: The strained conjunction of laws, policies and practices

“…Further studies should be carried out on the ‘negative’, unintentional or inconsequential role of laws, policies and practices as well as on the reasons for their inefficacy. As underlined by Solano (2022) and Özaşir Kaçar and Essers (2022) in this special section, practices developed by governmental and non‐governmental actors to support migrant entrepreneurs sometimes fail to consider the differences among the migrant groups or they act based on assumptions on migrants (e.g. overstating the differences between migrants and non‐migrant entrepreneurs).…”

“…Solano (2022) comparatively studies the legal and policy framework for migrant entrepreneurs by analysing laws, policies and practices in EU and OECD countries. By applying a mixed embedded approach, his article shows that the institutional framework restricts access to self‐employment for some categories of migrants (based on their legal status), while a wide range of measures is available to support migrant entrepreneurs (policy framework).…”

“…Fourth, as illustrated by Solano (2022), different opportunities are available for different kinds of migrant entrepreneurs ( based, e.g. on their legal status).…”

Migrant entrepreneurship in Europe: a systematic literature review

“…Some of the literature refers to migrant entrepreneurship (Berntsen et al, 2021;Hagos, Izak, and Scott, 2019;Sinkovics and Reuber, 2021;Solano, 2021;Szczygiel, Nunes, and Ramos, 2020), while some refers to immigrant entrepreneurship. (Abbasian and Yazdanfar, 2015a;Bolzani and Boari, 2018;Glinka and Hensel, 2020;Murphy, Bogue, and O'Flaherty, 2020;Širec and Tominc, 2017;Yazdanfar and Abbasian, 2013).…”

“…In a review of the literature on self-employment and entrepreneurship, Szaban and Skrzek-Lubasi nska (2018) position self-employment within the entrepreneurship paradigm. Amongst authors included in our review, definitions of entrepreneur include creating or establishing a business (Glinka and Hensel, 2020;Širec and Tominc, 2017;Solano, 2021), owning a business (Abbasian and Yazdanfar, 2015;Yazdanfar, Abbasian, and Brouder, 2015), managing one's one business (Szczygiel et al, 2020), and having an aim to succeed at business (Hagos et al, 2019). Given that migrants who are just getting started in their host countries and seeking support from government entrepreneurship initiatives may not have established a business yet, the broader definition by Hagos et al, (2019) seems the most comprehensive for this study.…”