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In many countries, ethnic minority groups are over-represented in self-employment compared with the majority community. The kind of work done by minority entrepreneurs can therefore be an important driver of the economic well-being of their ethnic group. Furthermore, growing the self-employment sector is a policy objective for many governments, which see it as a source of innovation, economic growth, and employment. While self-employment might offer economic opportunities to minority groups, it is important to understand the factors that underlie the nature and extent of ethnic entrepreneurship to evaluate whether policy measures should support it.

The economic crisis caused the ubiquitous growth of a number of self-employed in total employment. In particular groups of countries the self-employment differs both by its scale and composition. Compared to the Central and East European economies, the CIS countries show a much higher share of dependents in the families while the unit weight of employers using hired workers is considerably lower. One of the most characteristic features of self-employment in the transitional economies is very wide participation of women. This conclusion is especially true for CIS countries where women make up the prevailing part of self-employed and their share demonstrates a steady growth. In the Central and East European economies gender indicators are rather close to those in the developed nations. Men face a higher risk of becoming self-employed than women. As for Russia, in terms of volume, composition and structure of self-employment it stays close to the group of Central and East European countries rather than to CIS nations.

The paper is devoted to electronic self-employment as a new phenomenon of the labor market in the information society. The authors analyze the growing sector of self-employed professionals (freelancers) working remotely via Internet. Extensive quantitative data from online standardized surveys reveal the main demographic, social and professional characteristics of Russian-speaking e-lancers, as well as motivational, organizational and financial issues.

PurposeThe study aims to examine the non-linear relationship between self-employment and economic growth (growth) in the context of developing countries.Design/methodology/approachData from a sample of 83 developing countries covering a period 2002–2015 is used. The empirical analysis is based on the dynamic panel data estimation, and the results are estimated using the two-step system GMM technique. Non-linearity between self-employment and growth is validated using Sasabuchi (1980) and Lind and Mehlum (2010) (SLM) test.FindingsThe empirical analysis suggests a non-linear and a U-shaped relationship between self-employment and growth, confirmed by the SLM test. The threshold levels for total self-employment, female self-employment and male self-employment are 57.49%, 58.86 and 55.81%. The findings are also robust to alternate estimation technique and alternate measure of the dependent variable.Practical implicationsPolicy implications of the findings include the need for policies that foster and channel self-employment properly as the higher level of self-employment is found to benefit growth.Originality/valueThis study is the first attempt to examine the empirical relationship between self-employment and growth. As such, it makes a novel contribution to the extant literature on the relationship between the two variables.

ABSTRACTAn econometric model of the self employment decision is estimated for a large sample of UK graduates. Although the earnings distributions suggest that there are incentives to be self employed, the difference in the predicted earnings that an individual receives in the self employed and employed sectors is not a significant influence on the choice of sector and the decision depends on personal and social factors. Policies based on changing the pecuniary returns may not encourage the growth of self employment among graduates. The econometric results also suggest that the self employed are a non‐random subset of the graduate workforce., revision accepted August 1989

This book develops a unifying model, in which most of the market and personal determinants are integrated and set into perspective. It is shown how the developed unifying model can be converted into the well-known logit/probit models with estimable parameters. In this way these latter models are given a sound theoretical basis. Moreover, an explicit link is accomplished between two fields of economics that so far have developed almost independently: the theoretical general-equilibrium models and the empirical logit/probit models. The parameters of the derived probit models are estimated using two different data sets. The results are particularly interesting because use is made of a data set containing childhood and family background information of the potentially self-employed individuals. Finally, it is shown how the models of self-employment described in this book can be used to analyze the transitions from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, which takeplace in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. More specifically, political economic conditions are derived that may stimulate or inhibit such transitions

This paper studies the eff ects of foreign competition on self-employment levels. We begin by pointing out a previously unknown fact: the greater the exposure to foreign competition, the smaller the fraction of self-employed people. This fact holds across very different countries, across relatively similar countries like European Union members, and across industries within the United States. We develop a model where heterogeneous agents select themselves into being either employees or self-employed in the spirit of Lucas (1978). This, in turn, translates into intra-industry firm heterogeneity as in Melitz (2003). Self-employed agents (firms) can also decide to enter into the export markets, subject to fixed and variable trade costs. The model delivers three basic predictions: (1) domestic self-employment increases with the trade costs of exporting from a foreign country to the home country, (2) domestic self-employment increases with the trade costs of exporting to the foreign country, and (3) higher levels of self-employment are associated with a lower fraction of exporting firms. Our empirical work on inter-industry data for the United States confirms these predictions of the model.