ABSTRACT
Over the last decades the proliferation of entrepreneurial activities of immigrants in European countries has been driven by increasing immigration from economically less developed countries. The emergence and growing presence of immigrants' businesses and the so-called ethnic economies in Canada, the UK and the US and, more recently, in other Western European countries (i.e. France, Germany, the Netherlands), have led to important advances in the research on ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurship (Light 1972, 1979, 1990, 1993; Bonacich 1973, 1987; Portes 1986, 1989, 1990; Aldrich and Waldinger 1990; Waldinger et al. 1990; Bates 1997; Rath 2000, 2002; Rath and Kloosterman 2000; Constant and Zimmermann 2004; Zimmermann et al. 2003, 2006). Nevertheless, the entrepreneurial activity of immigrants has not been sufficiently explored in countries where increased immigration is a more recent phenomena, including Mediterranean countries such as Spain. Moreover, whereas the propensity of immigrants for self-employment has been analysed, little is known about the ongoing development of these initiatives.
