Advancing U.S. Latino Entrepreneurship

The health and growth of the U.S. economy increasingly relies on the health and growth of the economic fortunes of the country's Latino population. Latinos are now the second fastest-growing ethnic group (after Asians) and the largest "minority" group in the United States. Latinos are likely to continue to grow in importance given immigration patterns (though these are increasingly unpredictable), the young average age of the Latino population, and the relatively high birth rate among Latinos. Historically, Latinos' role in the economy was heavily concentrated in certain areas such as southern Florida and southern California, but Latinos have become a sizable demographic group throughout most of the country.

So, simply due to its size and growth, the Latino population is a substantial part of our overall economy and is important to businesses, policy makers, and the entire country given the interconnections of the economy. It is worth noting that if American Latinos were their own separate country, they would be the seventh-largest economy in the world with a gross domestic product roughly equal to the 1.3 billion people in India (Schink and Hayes-Bautista 2017).