Enterprise and Small Business Principles
Changes in the labour market
Alongside the development of particular niches to meet more sophisticated forms of demand, researchers have pointed to changes in the labour market to explain the growth of business ownership rates. For instance, researchers have pointed to the population change, increased wealth (Reynolds et al., 1994), immigration (21.8% of UK individuals whose ethnic origin was Pakistani were self-employed in 2001-02 (Social Trends, 2002)), and, above all, unemployment as being explanations for the growth in business ownership rates. In the UK context, Greene (2002) has shown that unemployment reached over three million in the 1980s. Concomitant with this, the 1980s also saw dramatic increases in the enterprise population. The implication, therefore, is that unemployed individuals were ‘pushed’ into self-employment due to the lack of alternative employment.
