The Role of Family Background in the Heterogeneity of Self-Employment in Some Transition Countries

Aim of this paper is to shed light on how some determinants, especially in the spheres of family background, differently affect the heterogeneous category of self-employment across four transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovak Republic), where more or less restrictive policies towards start-ups have been implemented during the pre-1989 years, different liberalization processes have gradually been carried out and distinct policy interventions to support self-employment have been adopted in the post-1989 period. At this end, three-stage structural multinomial logit models as discrete choice models are estimated on 2005 EU-SILC data, which also allows to account for generational changes over time. Country-specific profiles of self-employment are drawn and, even though the self-employment is often devised in a dualist perspective, which stresses its marginal nature as refuge from poverty rather than a way to accumulate capital, significant differentiations within the ranks of self-employed also exist. Copyright CEEUN 2013