Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Spatial Disparities: Divisions and Changes of Self-employment and Firms
Topic of the paper is the development of professional self-employment during the last decades in Germany. The discussion is divided into a theoretical and an empirical section. The first theoretical part deals with the term entrepreneurship and asks for its overlapping with categories of self-employment and of innovation. Although these terms cover only partially the same meanings, political discourse often equals the slogan to foster entrepreneurship and innovation with an increase of self-employment. The second section of the paper is concerned with concrete investigation of development patterns of occupational self-employment since the beginning of the 1990th until 2006 based upon microcensus data for Germany. First of all, the overall increase of self-employment becomes visible but the principle lines hide further fundamental structural changes. A majority of those „new“ self-employed people belongs into the category of solo-self-employment and micro firms without further employees. An equation of entrepreneurship with innovation activities and in-creasing self-employment ratios falls too short and is problematic with respect to discussion on economic policy needs to increase growth. Differentiation for regions, economic sectors and gender offers a picture which is contradictory and which does not correspond with some causal explanations as found conventionally.
Year of publication: |
2009-11-29
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Authors: | Bögenhold, Dieter ; Fachinger, Uwe |
Institutions: | Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München |
Subject: | self-employment | entrepreneurship | professionals | development | Germany |
Saved in:
freely available
Extent: | application/pdf |
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Series: | |
Type of publication: | Book / Working Paper |
Classification: | J44 - Professional Labor Markets and Occupations ; J23 - Employment Determination; Job Creation; Demand for Labor; Self-Employment ; R23 - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population |
Source: |
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008559048