Entrepreneurship plays an important role in the health of an economy, driving economic growth and sparking innovation. The dashboard below provides two key metrics for understanding the rate of entrepreneurship for American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) workers relative to the U.S. workforce as a whole. The tool can be used in association with the Native American Labor Market Dashboard and other data tools available from the Center for Indian Country Development to explore Native economic contributions and labor market conditions.
- The self-employment share is the number of self-employed workers (either with an incorporated or non-incorporated business) divided by the total number of employed workers.
- The entrepreneurship share is the number of self-employed workers with at least 10 employees in their business, divided by the total number of employed workers. This definition is adopted from the economics literature on entrepreneurship (see, for example, Kozeniauskas 2022).
About the dashboard
The data
Self-employment data are based on publicly available monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau, retrieved from the University of Minnesota’s IPUMS CPS. Data are not seasonally adjusted. Entrepreneurship data are based on the CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplements (ASEC).
The sample sizes for the total AIAN workers employed are small in any given month; consequently, the self-employment shares are shown using a lagging 12-month moving average of monthly estimates. For example, the self-employment share estimate for January 2023 is the arithmetic average of the estimated self-employment shares for February 2022 through January 2023. This method reduces month-to-month sampling volatility.
Entrepreneurship data are measured in March of each year. As a result, we report entrepreneurship shares annually.
Dashboard comparisons
Three comparisons are available for the self-employment data. First, estimates of the AIAN self-employment shares may be compared with those for the entire U.S. workforce. Second, self-employment share estimates may be compared for workers aged 25 or older with and without some college education. Third, self-employment share estimates may be compared for workers between ages 16 and 34 and workers ages 35 and older.