The Rise of the Creative Class

National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for "unpleasant" or "undesirable", which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country evidence on happiness and life satisfaction and consider whether these data will likely be replaced by the U-index. I find that first, that there are many similarities. According to both measures happiness is higher for the more educated, for married people, for those with higher income and for whites and lower for the unemployed; is U-shaped in age and un-trended over time in the USA although they are trended up in a number of EU countries and especially so in developing countries. Equivalent results are found using self-reported unhappiness data. Second, there is a large body of data on happiness that is unavailable on the U-index. For example, according to happiness research well-being across nations is lower the higher is the unemployment rate, the current inflation rate and the highest inflation rate in a person's adult life. Higher inequality also lowers happiness. Third, we know little about the predictive power of the U-index. Happiness and life satisfaction data seem able to forecast migration flows. Fourth, happy people are particularly optimistic about the future. Fifth, according to the happiness data the US ranks above France but the U-index suggests the reverse.

International evidence on well-being

Immigrants from non-industrialized countries have become part and parcel of the social fabric of many advanced urban economies, including those in the Netherlands. A significant number of these migrants opt for setting up shop themselves. Lacking access to large financial resources and mostly lacking in educational qualifications, they are funnelled towards the lower end of the opportunity structure of these urban economies. To survive in these cut-throat markets, many migrant entrepreneurs revert to informal economic activities that are strongly dependent on specific social networks – mostly consisting of co-ethnics – to sustain these activities on a more permanent basis. To understand the social position of these migrant entrepreneurs and their chances of upward social mobility, one has to look beyond these co-ethnic networks and focus on their insertion in the wider society in terms of customers, suppliers and various kinds of business organizations. To deal with this latter type of insertion, we propose the use of a more comprehensive concept of mixed embeddedness that aims at incorporating both the co-ethnic social networks as well as the linkages (or lack of linkages) between migrant entrepreneurs and the economic and institutional context of the host society. We illustrate this concept by presenting a case study of Islamic butchers in the Netherlands.



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Les immigrants des pays pas industrialises sont devenus une part integrale du tissu social de nombreuses economies urbaines developpees, y compris celles des Pays-Bas. Un nombre significatif de migrants choisissent de s’etablir a leur compte. N’ayant pas acces a des ressources financieres importantes et ayant peu de qualifications academiques, ils sont entraines vers le bas des structures de debouches de ces economies. Pour survivre dans ces economies tres dures, beaucoup d’entrepreneurs immigrants retournent aux activites economiques informelles qui dependent fortement des reseaux sociaux specifiques – principalement co-ethniques – pour soutenir ces activites de facon plus permanente. Afin de comprendre la position sociale de ces migrants entrepreneurs et leurs possibilites de mobilite sociale vers le haut, il faut regarder plus loin que ces reseaux co-ethniques et explorer leur insertion dans la societe en general par rapport aux clients, fournisseurs et divers types d’organisation commerciales. Pour traiter de ce type d’insertion, nous proposons d’utiliser un concept d’incorporation melangee plus comprehensif qui a pour but d’integrer a la fois les reseaux sociaux co-ethniques et les liens (ou manque de liens) entre les migrants entrepreneurs et le contexte economique et institutionnel de la societe d’acceuil. Nous illustrons ce concept par un cas d’etude de bouchers islamiques aux Pays-Bas.

Mixed Embeddedness: (In)formal Economic Activities and Immigrant Businesses in the Netherlands

Book-length study of black, Chinese, and Japanese self-employment in northern cities of the United States, 1880-1940, Self-employment is explained as a product of moral communities resulting from migration networks.

Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese and Blacks

This article examines the interaction between culture and immigrant entrepreneurship with reference to London's ethnic minorities. It compares the cultural attributes of different ethnic groups and how these affect their entrepreneurial behaviour. The article reports and analyses the results of 163 interviews with entrepreneurs from six different immigrant communities in London: Indian, East African Asian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Turkish Cypriot and Turkish. The findings indicate diversity in business entry motives, patterns of start-up finance and family involvement in business among the different ethnic groups. These may be explained by differences in several cultural attributes including family tradition, migration motives, religion, family links, business experience and educational attainment. The evidence suggests that the interaction between culture and entrepreneurship is stronger in the case of some ethnic groups than others.

/pdf/the-interaction-between-culture-and-entrepreneurship-in-28s9yjt77c.pdf

The Interaction between Culture and Entrepreneurship in London's Immigrant Businesses

One of the most novel features of recent labour market change in Europe and North America has been the increasing prominence of ethnic minority self-employment. Two decades of radical economic restructuring have brought about a marked shift away from employment in large ® rms to selfemployment in small ones; and, somewhat paradoxically, this trend has been most marked among members of certain migrant groups, often originating in the post-colonial Third World. At the most super® cial level this is evident in the increasingly high visibility, especially in the largest urban centres, of shops and services owned by immigrant-origin entrepreneurs. The South Asian and Chinese-owned small ® rms now so familiar a feature of the British urban scene have their counterparts in the North African and Asian businesses proliferating in parts of France (Dreyfus, 1992; Ma Mung and Simon, 1990), the Surinamese enterprises of Amsterdam (Boissevain, 1992), the Turkish enterprises of Germany (Blaschke and Ersoz, 1986) and above all the multitudinous polytechnic small business economy of North America, where well over 1m ® rms are classed as minority-owned (Light et al., 1994). In quantitative terms at least spectacle is borne out by statistics. In Britain the self-employment rate for people of Chinese ethnicity was recorded as 14.9 per cent of all economically active Chinese as opposed to 7 per cent for whites, while for Indians and Pakistanis the equivalent ® gures were 11.4 and 8.3 (OPCS, 1993). Comparisons with earlier benchmarks reveal these ® gures to be the product of two decades of rapid, sometimes breath-taking, growth (Table 1). Note here that the 1991 Census appears to underplay ethnic minority self-employment in comparison with other earlier or contemporaneous estimates. (See Blackburn, 1994; Curran and Burrows, 1988.) For the US, Light (1984) cites a dozen or so ethnic minorities as overrepresented in self-employment, with Jews (almost the stereotypical case), Chinese, Japanese and Koreans in the vanguard (see also Aldrich and Waldinger, 1990). In France too immigrant minorities are similarly prominent (Ma Mung, 1994; Boissevain, 1984). The overall impression is that ethnic minority capitalism is now virtually a standard feature of advanced urban economies and that, notwithstanding recession and economic crisis, it is waxing rather than waning (Ward, 1987a; Blaschke et al., 1990). Almost inevitably, the scholarly literature on ethnic minority business ownership has multiplied almost as rapidly as its subject

Ethnic Minority Business: Theoretical Discourse in Britain and North America

United Kingdom: Severely Constrained Entrepreneurialism

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe and assess the sustainability of an emergent West African business quarter in Manchester, UK. Comparisons are drawn with developments among other ethnic groups. The research is placed in the context of international literature on ethnic entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approach – The research is primarily qualitative, using semi‐structured interviews and conversational life histories with a sample of West African retail businesses and a comparative group of other local businesses. Some use is made of quantitative information from census and other public data sources.Findings – New West African enterprises appear, over the last few years, to have stabilised the declining retail district of Moston Lane in north Manchester. These new businesses are however confined to few sectors: food stores, hair and beauty salons, cafes, Internet cafes and clothing shops. These developments may parallel the success of longer established retail quarters in Manchester an...

An emerging African business quarter amid urban decline

Asian residential concentration and business development: An analysis of shopkeepers’ customers in three cities

Temporal and Geographical Variations in Ethnic Minority Business: Thirty Years of Research in the United Kingdom

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