While more current establishment data from more recent Small Business Owner surveys specific to AIAN-owned firms has not been published, more targeted studies of the economies of reservations and of their surrounding non-reservation areas have been conducted in recent years. In 2017, the Center for Indian Country Development published a working paper (2017-02) comparing the total number of establishments by industry sector located on reservations to off-reservation establishments in the 10 nearest counties to the reservations. Both establishment counts and employment counts were compared. According to the analysis, there were 281,300 establishments within the 514 counties included, of which only 5.2 percent or 14,601 were actually located within the boundaries of one of the 277 reservations included. Across the industrial sectors, only Mining/Quarrying/Extraction and Educational Services had more establishments located on the reservation per capita than off. The relative percentage of establishments by sector were much closer between on and off reservation areas than in the national statistics from 2007 previously described. It is important to note, however, that the figures from 2007 reflect AIAN versus non-AIAN ownership regardless of the location of the business and cover the entire country. The statistics from the 2017 working paper reflect only businesses on or near reservations and do not take ownership into account. Only Mining and Extraction shows a notable difference between percentages of total establishments on and off reservation, with a higher percentage of total on-reservation establishments in that sector than percentage off reservation. The graphs on the following page show percentages of establishments by sector on and off of the reservation from the working paper. In contrast to the establishment figures, there is considerable variation in the relative importance of each sector to employment on and off of the reservations. The primary reason is the dramatic difference in employment per establishment in the Arts/Entertainment/Recreation sector due to Indian gaming. As will be discussed in more detail later in this section, Indian gaming has allowed for the development of a number of very large and labor-intensive facilities on Indian reservations that surpass the majority of employers in the surrounding rural areas. As a result, total on-reservation employment for the geographies measured is a much higher percentage of total area employment than establishment counts would suggest. According to the working paper, there were a total of nearly 3.3 million jobs in the 514 counties, equating to 11.7 per establishment. However, establishments on the 277 reservations employed nearly 302,000, or 9.2 percent of that total, an average of 20.7 per on-reservation establishment. Several sectors, most but not all related to Indian gaming, had higher employment on the reservation per capita than off, including Arts/Entertainment/Recreation at a whopping five times as high, as well as Accommodations & Foodservice, Other Services, Public Administration, Management and Administrative Services and Information. Indeed, total employment per capita was higher on the reservation than off. It should be noted that these figures pertain to the location of the jobs, not the residence locations or ethnicities of the employees. The graphs on page 57 show percentages of employment by sector on and off of the reservation from the working paper.
∴ PROGNOSIS
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