A study on measures to promote job creation of social enterprises through expanding social economy

The global economy is facing various common problems owing to the growth without employment, government constraints on welfare spending, limits of labor market programs, expansion of neoliberal economic policies, and aggravation of polarization. Social economy, which has been extended to the domain of civil society as a complement to the liberal market economy, is the result of the citizens’ efforts to satisfy the social needs that cannot be fulfilled by the government or the market. Recently, many social economic entities, including social enterprises, community enterprises and cooperatives have been established in Korea due to the support of ministries. Every year, the number of users of service provided by social enterprises and the number of employees of the social enterprises, including those who are socially disadvantaged have increased. However, being small in size, most of them have difficulties in sustaining the business. Community enterprises and cooperatives, which have grew in number in the past 3-4 years, played a certain role in job creation. This study focuses on the concept and spread of social economy, which has been actively discussed recently and analyzes the status of social economy and social enterprises in foreign countries that have developed the social economy relatively early compared to Korea. In addition, it analyzes the growth and job creation effects of social enterprises, thus highlighting their importance in the economy. Identifying the status of employment of the social enterprises through questionnaires, it suggests measures to create and sustain jobs. Various measures could be taken to facilitate job creation of social enterprises. Firstly, awareness and understanding of social economy and social enterprises need to be improved. Secondly, suitable environment needs to be created for the growth of social enterprises. Thirdly, it needs to increase the number of social enterprises. Fourthly, to create jobs for the socially disadvantaged groups, it needs to come up with a plan to cooperate with other organizations, sharing the database. In order to sustain the current employment, it needs support for raising pride of employees of social enterprises in their work. Furthermore, policy support is needed to expand the ecosystem for social economy and to stabilize the employment of workers of social enterprises