An Empirical Study on the Duration of Self-employment

자영업 지속기간의 결정요인

The recent experience about self-employment shows three main trends: first, its share out of the total workers has steadily increased, recording 37.6% in 2001, implying its prevalence and importance; second, its share out of male workers has caught up female workers', implying its importance to males as well as females; and finally, during the recent Economic Crisis when there was mass layoff and large scale bankruptcy, its share rapidly increased, reflecting its role of a buffer to economic fluctuation. However, there have been few studies on self-employment, mainly focusing on what makes someone choose it as an alternative to being employed. This study analyzes the determinants of the duration to terminate self-employment, by applying the proportional hazard model to the Korea Labor and Income Panel Survey(KLIPS) by the Korea Labor Institute. The KLIPS started the first wave in 1998 with the 5,000 household sample (and about 12,000 individual sample of household members aged 15 and more). In this study, the first four waves are used for analysis. The average duration of 5,357 spells of self-employment is 130 months. It shows slight difference between males(124 months) and females(138 months) while it widely ranges over industries (296 months for agriculture industry while 50 months for restaurant and hotel industry). Estimates of the proportional hazard model of the self-employment duration show that females are more likely to terminate self-employment while it is not statistically significant. The effect of age at starting self-employment on the hazard shows the inverse V-shape, which implies that, until a certain age(47 years), the hazard become higher as aging while, since then, it become lower as aging. The level of education has a positive effect on the hazard, implying that more education is related to the higher probability to be employed. The measures of economic performances, annual sales and earnings, are positively related to continuing self-employment while hardship at the start of self-employment measured by several ways has a negative effect. Training before opening business has a positive effect on keeping on self-employment and its effects are different over its providers, significantly positive for public providers while insignificant for private providers. More and further research on self-employment is urgent in the rapidly ageing society. To help workers to be self-employed, more public assistance is necessary for education, training, financing, marketing, management, and human resource management in order to make the olders consider self-employment as a good alternative rather than an inevitable one.

한국의 노동시장에서 자영업이 차지하는 비중이 상당함에도 불구하고, 자영업에 대한 연구는 몇몇 연구자들에 의하여 진행되었고 기업가 정신(entrepreneurship)을 가진 개인의 자영업 창업 과정, 자영업의 성장 과정, 자영업의 소멸 과정에 대한 연구는 거의 없다고 보아야 할 것이다. 본 연구는 자영업의 소멸 과정에 초점을 두고 경과기간 모형을 "한국노동패널" 1차(1998)~4차(2001) 자료에 적용하여 자영업 지속기간이 결정요인을 분석하였다. 자영업 지속기간은 농림어업 및 제조업에서 길게 나타나고 숙박 및 음식점업에서는 상대적으로 진입과 퇴장이 빈번한 것으로 나타난다. 훈련경험이 있는 경우는 자영업의 지속성에 긍정적인 효과를 미치는 것으로 나타나며, 훈련의 주관자를 기준으로 볼 때, 특히 공공직업훈련이 미치는 효과가 눈에 띄게 나타난다. 이는 자영업 창업지원에서 정보 및 자금 측면뿐 아니라 자영업을 유지하기 위한 다양한 컨설팅이 주효할 수 있다는 것을 시사하는 것으로 간주할 수 있다.