01 Mar UW report: Slow, steady growth in minority-owned businesses
Business owners of color are a large and growing share of the business community in Wisconsin, but they still face many barriers to growth, according to a series of new reports out of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Community Economic Development program.
The four special reports, one each for Black-, Latino-, Asian-, and Native-owned businesses, highlight the number and size of businesses as well as unique challenges each group faces, including access to financing, business locations, and anti-Asian racism stemming from the pandemic.
The reports show remarkable growth in minority businesses during the pre-pandemic period, including the 15-year period from 1997 to 2012, a timeframe which included two recessions. “We saw that American Indian-owned businesses grew by about one-third, Asian-owned businesses doubled during that time period, Latino-owned ventures tripled during that period, and Black-owned businesses roughly quadrupled,” said UW–Madison professor Tessa Conroy, who along with research analyst Mary McDermott and community development specialist Matthew Kures, authored the reports.
Yet each business demographic was still underrepresented relative to the state’s population. As the pandemic approached (2019), the share of Wisconsin’s population which identified as Black or African American was 6.44%, yet Black-owned businesses only made up 4.3% of the state’s businesses.