Meandering Rides of the Swedish Taxi Industry: Flourishing Entrepreneurship or Ethnic Segmentation?

Abstract

Purpose: The study of the interplay between changes in policies, rules and regulations that have altered ethnic composition and incomes in the Swedish taxi industry since deregulation in the 1990s.

Design/methodology/approach: This is a mixed methods study, combining the qualitative interviews, scrutiny of relevant policy documents and statistical data of the Swedish population between 1992 and 2012. The analysis uses a mixed embeddedness perspective to show how the changed regulations resulted in new openings/closings in opportunities for individuals operating in the sector and how the proportion of immigrants in the sector, increased continuously between 1992 and 2012.

Findings:

• Policy changes have altered ethnic composition and incomes in the Swedish taxi sector
• Income differences between foreign-born and Swedish-born are decreasing
• It occurs however in the context of a general trend of lower wages within the sector
• New jobs are created, but these are low paid jobs with harsh working conditions.

Originality/value: What makes this paper original is the use of the mixed-method approach, combining the analyses of economic and ethnic changes in the sector with internal and external institutional changes in rules and regulations, which exemplify the essence of the mixed embeddedness concept. Additionally the quantitative part of the study uses register data - tax registers and population registers that includes entire population and is administered by Statistics Sweden in a database for REMESO.