Promoting Self-employment: Does it Create More Employment and Business Activity?

We assess the economic impact of reforms promoting self-employment in the three countries that have implemented such reforms since the early 2000s: the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France. To that end, we use an unbalanced cross country-industry dataset of 4,226 observations, including 12 OECD countries and 20 market industries, over the 1995-2016 period. We first observe, using country-level data, that the share of self-employed workers in total employment is quite stable or declines over the period in all countries in our dataset, except in the three countries where large reforms promoting self-employment have been implemented, and only after these reforms. We econometrically confirm this impact on self-employment in our set of 20 industries and we find that, at the end of the period, the reforms may have increased the share of self-employed workers in total employment by 5.5pp on average in the Netherlands, 2.5pp in the United Kingdom and 2pp in France. Then, we investigate the impact of reforms on total employment and value added using a difference-in-differences approach. In spite of a broad sensitivity analysis, we find no evidence that the reforms may have impacted either total employment or value-added. These results suggest that the reforms promoting self-employment may have raised the number of self-employed workers, but mostly through a substitution effect between the self-employed and employees, and not through a supply effect or a substitution effect with informal activities. This means that the reforms may have failed to achieve their main objectives.