Despite being the most balanced economies among OECD countries, Finland’s economic development has been driven by metropolitan Helsinki-centered growth, with employment indicators showing the greatest regional disparities. This paper investigates whether rising immigration trends may reshape the landscape of job creation disparities across regions and municipalities. We examine to what extent immigration contributes to regional development in terms of employment and entrepreneurship; and whether this translates into outcomes at smaller municipality-levels, including the growth and stock of enterprises in areas with higher migrant-concentration. We employ regional and municipality-level datasets from Statistics Finland, as well as spatial data from the National Land Survey, allowing us to incorporate spatial dimensions of regional and municipal characteristics from 2013 to 2017.

Employing a spatial autoregressive (SAR) fixed-effects model, we find that foreign population share is positively associated with the growth of establishments and enterprises at regional and municipality levels, particularly in manufacturing, constructions, and information technology sectors. However, examination of turnover data shows that enterprises in migrant-concentrated regions tend to have lower turnover, suggesting that immigrants are likely to establish themselves in low-profit or smaller businesses. At the municipality level, although foreign citizen shares are positively associated with the number of enterprises, their presence correlates negatively with the enterprise openings, though the effects are weak. This pattern may indicate that enterprises in migrants-concentrated regions might experience some stagnation or saturation. Our findings suggest that policy measures should focus on programs to foster migrant entrepreneurship and attract highly-skilled foreign talents.