Promoting self-employment

Being self-employed
Self-employment

Description

Promoting self-employment involves creating supportive conditions for individuals to start and sustain their own businesses, addressing barriers such as lack of access to finance, skills, and markets. This strategy provides training, mentorship, and regulatory simplification to empower people, particularly the unemployed and marginalized, to generate income independently. By fostering entrepreneurship, it remedies job scarcity, reduces dependency on formal employment, and stimulates local economic development through increased innovation and self-reliance.

Context

The dominance of the public sector, inappropriate macro-economic policies, market distortions, large-scale or capital intensive biases in national economic and sectoral policies, and deficiencies in the legal and institutional framework governing private economic activity all lead to inefficient resource use and a relatively low level of self-employment. In particular, there is substantial untapped potential for an increase in the more productive forms of self-employment in the economies of eastern Europe, in some other industrialized countries, and in many developing countries. Women are increasingly seeking self-employment, often as a response to the lack of job opportunities in the public and private sector resulting from recession and restructuring.

While 84% of Europeans in work were salaried employees in 1999, nearly 20% would rather have been self-employed, although nearly 40% would have found this unacceptable. Those that were self-employed at that time included more men than women and their average age was higher than in the case of salaried employees. Self-employed people worked longer hours - over 48 hours a week as compared to less than 38 hours for salaried employees. Nearly two-thirds of the self-employed worked in the services sector.