Calculating Parity of Minority Business Enterprises and the Expansion of the U.S. Economy

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.