Abstract
We investigate the impact of country R&D on the allocation of self-employment across different types, where types are identified based on occupational status and start-up motive. We first conduct a literature review based on which we consider the self-employed with employees to be of higher ‘quality’ (in terms of their overall contribution to the economy) compared with independent own-account workers, who in turn may be considered of higher quality than dependent self-employed workers. Similarly, we also consider opportunity self-employed to be of higher quality than necessity self-employed. Our empirical analysis then shows that the level of a country’s R&D expenditures increases the share of self-employed with employees and that of opportunity self-employed (i.e. the self-employment types associated with higher quality) at the cost of the shares of dependent self-employed and necessity self-employed. Higher R&D expenditures at the country level thus increase the quality of self-employment in the country.
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The more relevant traditional and recent approaches are (i) innovative against imitative entrepreneurs (Schumpeter 1912); (ii) productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurs (Baumol 1990); (iii) self-employed with or without employees (Carrasco 1999); (iv) dependent against independent self-employment (Burchell et al. 1999); (v) opportunity against necessity entrepreneurs (Reynolds et al. 2002); (vi) providing versus enabling entrepreneurship (Burke 2012) and (vii) the distinction between several engagement levels in the entrepreneurial process (Van der Zwan et al. 2010).
Thus, most previous studies focus on a single country (e.g. CRSE 2017). The only conditional analysis that characterizes dependent self-employed workers, compared with self-employed and paid employed in a cross-country comparable setting is the work by Millán and Millán (2017). Another related conditional analysis is that by Millán et al. (2018), which which compares job satisfaction of independent own-account works and dependent self-employed workers. Also interesting is the work by Lyalkov et al. (2019), where the interrelation between the share of the self-employed workforce in a given country that can be considered ‘entrepreneurial’ and trademark registration at the country level is explored. In this work, both necessity entrepreneurs and dependent self-employed workers are considered ‘non-entrepreneurial’ types.
This set includes the EU-28 together, five candidate countries (Albania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey) and two EFTA countries (Norway and Switzerland).
PPS is the technical term used by Eurostat for the common (artificial) currency in which national account aggregates are expressed when adjusted for price level differences using PPPs. Thus, PPPs can be interpreted as the exchange rate of the PPS against the €.
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Acknowledgments
All authors contributed equally to the manuscript. The authors would like to thank the guest editor, Maksim Belitski, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that contributed substantially to the development of this paper. The work also has benefited from comments from participants at the Workshop Knowledge Frontiers and Entrepreneurship, held at the Indiana University Europe Gateway (Berlin, 2018) and sponsored by the British Academy, where an earlier version of this paper was presented. This paper is part of Serhiy Lyalkov’s doctoral dissertation, which has been written under the framework of the PhD Program in Economics, Business, Finance and Computer Science at the University of Huelva and the International University of Andalusia, Spain.
Funding
The study was supported by the National Science Centre of Poland under Research Project no. 2015/19/B/HS4/00366 (Self-employment from Polish and international perspective); the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) through projects ECO2017-86305-C4-2-R and ECO2017-86402-C2-2-R; Regional Government of Andalusia (Junta de Andalucía) through Research Group SEJ-487 (Spanish Entrepreneurship Research Group (SERG)); and University of Huelva through Research and Transfer Policy Strategy (Estrategia de Política de Investigación y Transferencia) 2018.
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Burke, A., Lyalkov, S., Millán, A. et al. How do country R&D change the allocation of self-employment across different types?. Small Bus Econ 56, 695–721 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00196-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00196-z