Asian-owned businesses grow sharply in US

WASHINGTON—Businesses owned by Asian Americans have grown at more than twice the national average, offering a boost to the United States economy, official figures said Thursday.

Releasing a survey taken twice each decade, the Census Bureau said that Asian Americans owned 1.5 million businesses in 2007, a rise of 40 percent from five years earlier. The national growth rate was 18 percent.

“Asian-owned businesses continued to be one of the strongest segments of our nation’s economy,” Thomas Mesenbourg, the deputy director of the Census Bureau, said in a statement

The businesses generated more than $500 billion in sales in 2007 and employed some 2.8 million people, the Census Bureau said.

Of Asian-owned businesses, more than one-quarter were run by Chinese Americans. Businesses owned by Vietnamese Americans were among the fastest growing, increasing nearly 56 percent over the five-year period.

Businesses by most US minority groups have been growing strongly, with African American-owned firms soaring more than 60 percent between 2002 and 2007.

The United States is becoming increasingly diverse. The latest census found nearly 14.7 million Asian Americans, a rise of nearly half from a decade earlier. Only the US Hispanic population grew more quickly.