The determinants of migrant entrepreneurship: a comparison of Italy and the UK

Abstract The aim of this paper is to use a comparative approach to assess the role played by national and local opportunity structures, as well as individual characteristics, in influencing migrants’ self-employment decisions in Italy and the UK, two countries characterized by significantly different institutional environments. The empirical investigation exploits data from the EU Labor Force Survey for the 2005–2016 period. Our results confirm that migrant entrepreneurship is a context-dependent phenomenon: while individual determinants like age, seniority, and gender, as well as local positive factors such as native self-employment rates, exert a consistent influence across both nations, other drivers diverge sharply. Notably, the impact of education and world region of origin is significantly modulated by country-specific institutional and economic conditions. These findings align with mixed-embeddedness and intersectionality literature, emphasizing that entrepreneurial trajectories are not uniform but are fundamentally shaped by the interplay between migrants’ personal attributes and the host country’s specific opportunity structure.