EGENFÖRETAGARE I VÄLFÄRDEN : En studie om transfereringsberoende bland företagare

Self- employed have often been portrayed as the heroes of our generation and the hope for the future. Most of the job opportunities today exist within small and medium sized companies. However, self-employed face hardships accessing the welfare insurances according with their job situation and lifestyle. It is to some degree impossible for the self-employed to match the insurances with their level of lifestyle to the same extent as regular salary employed. Thus, how dependent of welfare transfers can self-employed be, and do they have to find other solutions for their security elsewhere rather from the welfare state? Against this background as well as leaning on previous research and theory of welfare capitalism, this study investigates the relationship between self-employment and transfer-dependency, while also controlling for some characteristics within the category self-employed. Our hypothesis is that self- employed is less transfer- dependent than regular salary employed, even after we have taken absence from work, age, gender, household- income into account. We use data from “Employment, material resources, and political preferences” (EMRAPP) with some variables from administrative registers to conduct this thesis. We find that self-employed indeed are less transfer- dependent than regular salary employed, at least if we only see to the selfemployed compared with employees. But after all the variables have been controlled for, the differences even out and we find that there are no longer any statistically significant differences between self- employed and regular salary employed