The role of family background in the heterogeneity of self-employment in some transition countries

Abstract

The 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 a set of transition economies of Eastern Europe, where more or less restrictive policies and different liberalization processes have been adopted over time. At this end, three-stage multinomial logit models as discrete choice models are estimated on 2005 EU-SILC data. Country-specific peculiarities of self-employment profiles are drawn and, although the occupational status is often devised in a dualist perspective, significant differentiations within the ranks of self-employed also exist