Māori businesses in Aotearoa New Zealand: Modelling Indigenous enterprise using self-identification and ownership

Abstract

Identity and ownership are two conceptual pillars used to define Indigenous enterprise. Approaches that use administrative data offer the opportunity to identify Indigenous-owned enterprises without the burden of a survey. It remains unclear, however, if Indigenous-owned enterprises are also likely to self-identify as Indigenous. Thus, in this paper we examine if self-identification as an Indigenous business in Aotearoa New Zealand is driven by Māori ownership. We link information from businesses that had the opportunity to self-identify as Māori in an annual survey with administrative data from Stats NZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure to calculate their proportion of Māori ownership. Then, we fit models of varying complexity using a Bayesian multilevel approach to predict the probability of self-identification as a Māori business as a function of businesses’ demographic variables and proportion of Indigenous ownership. Using model comparison and out-of-sample predictions we show that Māori ownership is a weak predictor of self-identification as a Māori business. We also show how the probability of self-identification as an Indigenous enterprise changes between regions, sectors, and industries to illustrate the benefits of a quantitative approach to target businesses likely to self-identify as Māori. Predicting the extent to which enterprise owners might choose to self-identify as a Māori business is critical to identifying a robust population of Indigenous businesses and to have better estimates of the Indigenous economy.