The report looks at the current and potential future contributions of employer minority firms and the key underlying drivers in their contribution to the U.S. macroeconomy. By using simple linear trends in the historical and current contributions of employer minority firms to the U.S. economy and projecting these trends forward, a baseline is established for the path of minority business economic growth. The report underscores the importance of having a greater focus on minority business productivity to fill an economic opportunity gap.

The Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) first tackled the question of an opportunity gap approximately twenty years ago and proposed the concept of parity as an approach to answering it. This publication provides the reader with the Agency’s current methodology for calculating entrepreneurial parity which is used to illustrate the gap between current facts about minority business enterprises and an ideal state of affairs. For MBDA, the three economic output measurements most easily tracked are: the number of minority-owned firms, total gross receipts, and number of employees.