Latinos own 350,000 employer businesses in the U.S., creating nearly 3 million American jobs, and driving a GDP of more than $2 trillion. The Latino population in the U.S. has more than doubled since the 1990s, growing from 8 percent to 18 percent by 2015. In turn, the number of businesses owned by Latinos is rising. In 1996, just 6 percent of all businesses were owned by Latinos; today that number has more than doubled to nearly 13 percent.
Yet, despite this progress, there remains a significant gap in entrepreneurial participation between Latinos and non-Latinos. If this gap were closed, Latino-owned businesses could make even larger contributions to the American economy, with an extra 650,000 employer businesses and an additional 5.3 million jobs.
This report quantifies this entrepreneurship gap through a “Latino Entrepreneurship Score,” created by analyzing data from the 2015 U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE). The ASE is an annual survey of over 200,000 entrepreneurs of employer businesses in the U.S. The Latino Entrepreneurship Score is measured across national, state, and metropolitan areas, and explores possible reasons preventing Latinos from achieving their full entrepreneurial potential.