42% of self-employed in Bulgaria cite ‘suitable opportunity’ as reason
Forty-two per cent of self-employed people in Bulgaria cited “suitable opportunity” as the reason to go into business for themselves, the largest share giving this reason among all EU member countries, the bloc’s statistics agency Eurostat said on December 11.
Eurostat said that in the EU in 2017, there were more than 228 million employed people, and about 33 million of them were self-employed.
Self-employed people in the EU reported several reasons for becoming self-employed in the current job: suitable opportunity (23 per cent), continuation of the family business (16 per cent), usual practice in the field (15 per cent), flexible work hours (11 per cent), no job found as employee (11 per cent) and request by former employer (2 per cent).
There is a slight difference with regard to reasons to become self-employed reported by male and female self-employed in the EU.
More women than men followed the usual practice in the field (16 per cent of female self-employed vs 14 per cent male self-employed) and more women than men opted for flexible work hours (14 per cent vs 10 per cent).
As the main difficulties, the self-employed report high administrative burden (13 per cent) and periods of having no customer, no assignments or projects to work on (12 per cent), delayed payments or non-payments (12 per cent), periods of financial hardship (nine per cent), lack of influence on price settings (eight per cent) and lack of income in case of illness (eight per cent).
Almost one third of them reported not facing difficulties (28 per cent).
In 2017, in the EU, 77 per cent of the self-employed had two and more clients where none was dominant, 18 per cent of self-employed people in the EU depended on a dominant client and 4 per cent had no client in the last 12 months.
In 15 EU countries, “suitable opportunity” was most frequently mentioned as the reason for becoming self-employed, with the largest share in Bulgaria (42 per cent), Italy (39 per cent) and Hungary (36 per cent).
In three countries – Belgium (28 per cent), Germany (21 per cent) and Latvia (20 per cent) – the most frequent reason was “usual practice in the field”.
In another three – Poland (27 per cent), Greece (25 per cent) and Spain (24 per cent) – “continuation of family business” was predominant.
“No job found as an employee” was noted as the most frequent reason in Romania (38 per cent) and Cyprus (25 per cent).
In five countries – Austria (40 per cent), Denmark (35 per cent), the United Kingdom (27 per cent), Luxembourg and France (both 26 per cent) – the self-employed wanted to run their own business for “other reason”.
(Photo: Serkan ER/freeimages.com)
