Self-Employed Immigrants in Denmark and Sweden: A Way to Economic Self-Reliance?

Pernilla Andersson Joona and Eskil Wadensjö

No 1130, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Immigrants have a weak position in the labour market in most European countries. Many have difficulties in establishing themselves in the labour market, the employment rate is low and the hourly wages are generally lower than what could be expected from characteristics (age, gender, education). Many have to rely on the social transfer payments including social assistance. One way to avoid the problems in getting a job is to become self-employed. In this paper we make use of two large data-sets to study self-employment among immigrants in Denmark and Sweden. The three main issues covered are 1) if the immigrants are overrepresented among the self-employed, 2) the characteristics of self-employed immigrants, and 3) the incomes of the self-employed immigrants. In each case we compare the situation in the two countries. The immigrants, especially immigrants from non-Western countries, are overrepresented among the self-employed in both countries. The selfemployed immigrants in both countries have relatively low incomes, lower than natives with the corresponding characteristics.

Keywords: immigrant workers; self-employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J23 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2004-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp1130.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp1130

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().