Self-employment and social protection: understanding variations between welfare regimes

Abstract

Given the mounting importance of self-employment on the political and policy agenda on a national and EU level, this article sheds light on the under- researched area of social protection for these workers. It focuses on their statutory access to social protection schemes in 35 European countries. We classify social protection systems into three categories based on the access they provide to insurance-based schemes for the self-employed. Crucially, we discuss the link between statutory access to social protection for these workers and typologies of welfare regimes and show that it tends to follow the main institutional patterns of these.