Indigenous entrepreneurship: an analysis of capital constraints

Encouraging entrepreneurship has been advocated as the most promising avenue for economic development of Indigenous communities in Australia. Unfortunately, the number of Indigenous people engaged in small businesses in Australia is quite low when compared to participation rates in Canada and the United States of America. While rationales for low Indigenous participation rates in small businesses have been advanced for other Pacific nations, a cogent explanation for low rates of Indigenous entrepreneurship remains to be articulated for Australia. This conceptual paper adopts an environmental view of entrepreneurship and demonstrates that lack of access to capital in its multiple forms explains low Indigenous entrepreneurship rates.