have a harder time gathering these elements. Scholars who study the development of the minority small-business community in the United States are unanimous on at least one issue: minority self-employment patterns only make sense in the context of prevailing constraints and opportunities.27 However, many of those opportunities have been opened up in recent years. For example, there was a positive 92.9 percent change in the amount of business degrees awarded to African-Americans between the years of 1976 and 1992. This growth in higher education can be accountable for a successful boom, nationwide, in African-American entrepreneurship. Yet, this recent enjoyed success must be still read in the light of ever prevailing limited opportunities for African-Americans to receive capital from major banks.28 In light of these blocked opportunities Bates states, Possession of class resources and access to social resources are positive factors encouraging prospective entrepreneurs to take the plunge into self-employment. They are pull factors. Blocked opportunities to pursue wage and salary employment are push factors, dictating that self-employment be pursued, even though one may prefer to work as an employee in a managerial or professional occupation.29 When put into these terms it is evident how the relationship of African-American entrepreneurs plays out to Asian-American entrepreneurs.William Baumol states that if we want to explain why some economies have grown significantly and others have remained relatively stagnant, we must look at `differences in the availability of entrepreneurial talent and in the motivational mechanism which drives them on.30 Holding this to be true and relating it to the recent boom in African-American entrepreneurship, that has a direct correlation to the loosening of discrimination practices, and the implementation of affirmative action programs, one can see that there lies, in the African-American comm...
