One route to entering the labour market from unemployment is through business creation. However, unemployed people face many barriers to self-employment, including less access to finance for business start-up and depreciating skills and networks. This chapter presents the common public policy approaches used in the EU to support unemployed people in creating businesses, including information, financial support before and after start-up, the use of role models, training, coaching and mentoring and business consultancy.

Ethnic minority groups are very active in entrepreneurship in many EU countries. This chapter reports on the level of entrepreneurship activities by ethnic minority groups and some of the key characteristics of these businesses. It also presents the main barriers to business start-up for potential ethnic minority entrepreneurs and actions that policy makers can take to support ethnic minority groups in overcoming these barriers. Inspiring practices from across the EU are presented to illustrate these actions.

This chapter examines the role of business development support services in promoting and supporting business creation and self-employment among potential entrepreneurs from disadvantaged and under-represented groups. The chapter investigates the range of public and not-for-profit policy approaches in the European Union and makes recommendations on how to strengthen such support.

Social security systems can influence business creation decisions even though their overall objectives do not normally include the promotion of entrepreneurship. The costs and benefits of social security for the employed and the self-employed differ and this often has the effect of lower levels of coverage for the self-employed. This chapter considers the ways in which social security affects inclusive entrepreneurship and the policy approaches which have been made to mitigate perverse effects of social security systems on self-employment and business creation.