Thursday, November 02, 2006

Overjoyed with the Self-Employed!

Two things caught my attention at my random trip to the OECD this time.

For the “capitalist” center of the world, the US sure has a low percentage of entrepreneuers.



They broke down this statistic further by male and female. As was to be expected, a higher percentage of the male labor force was self-employed than the women, but there were a couple countries where the women were more entrepreneurial. Thus I subtracted the male self-employment rate from the female self-employment rate, resulting in a kind of ‘index’ to measure female entrepreneurship in different countries.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The 800lb gorilla in the room is, why are women so much more likely to be self employed in Turkey? Without having any real knowledge about turkey, I'll suggest a hypothesis: women are discriminated against in turkey, but not to the same degree in other Islamic countries. No one wants to prevent women from working, but no one wants to hire women either. In order for them to get a job, they have to create it themselves.

Anyone else have any better insights?

Anonymous said...

Notice Turkey. Oh, the wonder of islamic opression of females.

Anonymous said...

I would think that there is an issue with the OECD definition of self employment. Does this include small, incorporated firms? I would postulate that significant numbers of sole proprietors incorporate in the US and Canada both for the liability limitations, as well as the more favourable tax treatment. Also, is the OECD perhaps over-measuring the grey market economies in some of those countries?

Captain Capitalism said...

Got me, busy season, don't have time to check, be curious though.

Anonymous said...

A better insight from Turkey;
OECD definition of self-employment includes unpaid family workers. That is why women self-employment ratio is so high for Turkey. Unfortunately %50 of employed women work in farms as an unpaid family worker. "no one wants to prevent women from working" that is true but partly. some men dont want their wife's working. Anyway, it can be seen that women participation ratio is increasing with higher education level.