Factors driving the share and growth of Chinese entrepreneurship in Italy

Abstract

Chinese entrepreneurship may represent an important growth lever for a manufacturing country like Italy. Chinese are both one of the fast growing ethnic communities in Europe and one of the most entrepreneurial. The development of ethnic enclave further contributes to support the increasing role of migrant entrepreneurship on local development. In the last decade, Chinese community is expanding at regional level and its entrepreneurial attitude is strongly increasing compared to natives in despite of economic crisis. However, since Chinese entrepreneurs are not homogeneously distributed, looking at spatial and industrial dependence is crucial to better understand the Chinese entrepreneurship growth strategies and to suggest policies supporting and exploiting local network externalities potentially influencing the regional development. In this perspective, this study focuses on the role of Chinese community size and its capacity to stimulate entrepreneurial specialisation rather than diversification across industries as well as the industrial specialisation of the local system in driving the share and growth rate of Chinese micro-entrepreneurship.