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Income poverty and deprivation among self-employed in Sweden

For the 2012 ESPAnet conference in Edinburgh: Stream 5 (Work and Poverty)

Daniel Larsson

Ingemar Johansson Sevä

Department of Sociology1

Umeå University

Abstract

In the in-work poverty literature a bi-result in almost all papers and books so far published is that self employed have higher poverty rates than employees, and in some cases even higher than among unemployed. However, it has been pinpointed, rightly, that the self employed are problematic due to issues regarding registered income, and that income data is a less good indicator for the living condition among self employed compared with employees. There are furthermore a few studies indicating that even though self employed have higher poverty rate than employees, relative deprivation among self employed is equal with skilled workers. In this paper we will use a new set of data produced for the purpose to investigate the living condition of the self employed closer, making it possible to investigate the material and economic situation of the self employed more in detail than previous research has been able to do. We have access to income data and deprivation items. In this paper we will investigate the overlap between income poverty and deprivation among self employed, unemployed and employees. We will furthermore investigate the impact of industry and the personality trait among employees and self employed and among poor/deprived and non poor/non deprived. The results indicate that the overlap between income poverty and deprivation is better among employee than among self employed. We also found that industries defined as the low income service sector are overrepresented both regarding self employed and in-work poverty. Furthermore, self employed in general have different personality traits than employee at the same time as poor in general have different personality traits than non-poor. However, no clear cut overlap in personality traits can be found between self employed and the poor.

Keywords: Self employed, in-work poverty, relative deprivation

Introduction

Small businesses have since the 1970s been highlighted by politicians, scholars and commentators as

important engines of growth and job creators. In parallel, the number of small businesses in the

economy has increased in recent decades (Arum and Mueller, 2004). In Sweden the number of small

businesses increased substantially after the economic crisis in the early 1990’s. The number of firms

having between 1 and 19 employees increased by 17 per cent between 1993 and 2002 (SCB, 1986).

However, the importance of small businesses for economic growth and the creation of jobs have no

1 Contact the authors: daniel.larsson@soc.umu.se

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straightforward relationship to increasing welfare. In fact Rainnie ( 1989) argued quite early that the

argument behind such a relationship resembles the neoliberal ideology which had its breakthrough

during the late 1970’s and the 1980’s (Harvey, 2007). It has for some time instead been argued that

an increase in the number of small businesses is related to economic crisis since a large segment of

the working population is forced into self-employment when job opportunities are scarce and the

regular labour market difficult to access (Arum and Mueller, 2004). This reasoning has also been an

argument regarding the high proportion of immigrants among self-employed (Andersson and

Wadensjö, 2003). From this perspective self-employment might instead be related to a lack of

welfare such as poverty, relative deprivation and social exclusion.

In the recent literature about working poverty this suspicion seems to be confirmed. In Peña-Casa

and Lattas report (2004) about working poverty in Europe 14 per cent of the self-employed was poor,

compared to 6 per cent among employees and 39 per cent among the unemployed. In the report

Sweden stands out to some extent, where 24 per cent of the self-employed was poor, compared to 3

per cent among employees and 19 per cent among unemployed. In Sweden thus, self-employed had

even higher poverty rates than unemployed. However, Sweden is also of particular interest regarding

the material conditions of self-employed since the comprehensive welfare state and the famous

Swedish labour market policy during the 1950’s and 1960’s (the wage solidarity policy), was mainly

related to big firms and a suppression of small business (Henrekson and Jakobsson, 2001). Two

aspects of the Swedish labour market and welfare state was significant for this development. The

pension system from the 1960’s implied that enormous public funds was built up and together with

the generous welfare system the incitement to save and invest money and capital was low. At the

same time the Rehn-Meiner model on the labour market strived to increase efficiency in the industry

with support from the unions which implied that firms not able to pay the centralized set wages was

eliminated. These firms were nearly all small businesses.

From the late 1980’s until present time, Sweden has, however, to a high degree abandoned these

policies, with a decentralization of the wage bargain system (Edin and Holmlund, 1995; Elvander,

2002) and a reformation of the pension system (Sundén, 2006; Sundén, 1998). In the light of the

economic crisis in the beginning of the 1990’s combined with these reforms, it is no wonder that the

rate of self-employment and small enterprises has increased in Sweden.

The figures presented above regarding poverty among self-employed, can be questioned. First of all,

the poverty rates are based on income data. It is plausible to suspect that self-employed have more

assets than their incomes gives appearance of, and it has been suggested that discrepancies between

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reported income and actual income is larger among self-employed compared to employees (Bardone

and Guio, 2005). Secondly, the figures are based on samples representative of the population, in

which the self-employed constitute a rather small fraction, about 10 per cent of the population in

Sweden. This means that it is problematic to do in depth studies of self-employed due to the

heterogeneity of the group. With this as the main background we have collected survey data based

on two subsamples. One subsample consists only of self-employed while the other is representative

for the entire population. This data set makes it possible for us to analyse the poverty situation of the

self-employed in depth. In addition to the survey data we also have information from registers

stretching ten years back in time.

This paper consists of the first tentative analyses which later on will be developed into several

different papers. The specific aim of the present paper is to investigate the impact of two different

poverty measurements with a focus on self-employed and to what degree different poverty

measurements are related to different aspects and background variables. From previous research on

poverty in general we know that the overlap between different ways of measuring poverty is quite

poor, not the least regarding income poverty and deprivation (Halleröd and Larsson, 2008; Bradshaw

and Finch, 2003). We further know that different measurements are differently related to other

welfare problems (Halleröd and Larsson, 2008). However, we do not know anything about these

issues regarding the specific group of self-employed. In the present paper we will also focus on the

significance of branch/industry and personality traits for material conditions.

It is well known that most self-employed are small enterprisers and previous research has shown that

small enterprises are more common in certain branches. Traditionally small enterprises have been

common in agriculture and handcraft. However, in the wake of the structural economic changes

during the last 40 years, increasing numbers of small businesses can primarily be found in the

technology industry, consultants, and qualified professionals – but also in the labour intensive service

sector (Arum and Mueller, 2004). The most poor-prone here are probably in the last industry.

Previous research regarding personality traits has shown that self-employed can be divided into two

different personality traits, the entrepreneur and the administrator (Magnus Henrekson and

Stenkula, 2006; Schumpeter, 1983), and that self-employed in general have specific personality traits

(Zhao and Seibert, 2006; Beugelsdijk and Noorderhaven, 2005). However, we know fairly little about

differences in personality traits regarding poor and non-poor. Maybe parts of the differences in

poverty risks between self-employed and employees can be explained by e.g. failure among higher

risk takers.

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The strategy in the paper is to compare separate analyses between factors and poverty – based on

the two mentioned measurement – on the one hand and the correlation between employee/self-

employment and the same factors on the other hand.

The data set

In the autumn of 2011 we collected survey data based on two subsamples, one representative for

self-employed and one representative of the entire Swedish population of working age. The data

consists of 2642 respondents from stratum 1, which is the representative sample, and 2483

respondents from stratum 2, which consists of self-employed only. The response rate is 41 per cent

among the self-employed 45 per cent for the subset representative of the entire population. We

have sufficient survey and register data which will make it possible to do analyses of issues that have

previously not been possible to investigate. The survey consists of a large set of questions dealing

with political orientations, aspects of the household, income situation as well as deprivation items.

We have done carful analyses of the structure and character of the non-responders in relation to the

responders, and have not found any significant bias apart from a larger proportion of high income

earners as well as those having higher level of education among the responders. This is, however,

also the case in several other data sets with higher response rates than we have.

Dependent variables – the poverty and deprivation measures

In the present paper we have only included the working population. The first limitation comes from

the data, which consists of responders aged 25 to 64 years. The second issue to deal with is to

determine what “working” means. The literature presents a lot of different ways to define and

discern workers from non-workers; however the most common way from a European perspective

and the method used by Eurostat, is to define those who have worked more than 6 of the last 12

months as working. To make the paper comparable with most other studies on working poverty we

have chosen the same measurement. When the non-working has been excluded from the data the

data consists of 2204 employees and 1916 self-employed (see Table 1).

We use two poverty measurements; income poverty and deprivation/consensual poverty. The

income poverty measurements is defined as living in a household having less than 60 per cent of the

median household income. The measurement is based on incomes responders themselves claims to

have in the household they live in. Later on we will also have access to household incomes

information collected by the tax authorities. In the future we will therefore be able to make

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comparisons of these two income poverty measurements (i.e. income poverty based on self reported

incomes and income poverty based on register data), which are of importance since international

research quite often use register based income in some countries and self-assessment questions in

some countries (for example EU-SILC).

Table 1: Employees and self employed Frequency n

Employee 53.5 2204

Self employed without employees

29.0 1193

Self employed with employees 17.5 723

However, we do not really know whether these two different income indicators show the same

thing. This is not the least important regarding the self-employed, among which it has been

suggested that discrepancies in the reporting of income and the access of income is greater

compared with employee (see above). It may furthermore be discrepancies regarding the income of

the poor. In self-assessment questions some may overrate their income because of embarrassment,

and some may underrate their incomes.

To deal with different family sizes we have used the modified OECD equivalent scale. The calculation

of the median income is not based on the total population, but on the population aged between 25

and 64 years old. This means that we overestimate the poverty rate for the group under investigation

somewhat, since the age groups above and below the age range we have access to in general have

lower income. However, that is a minor problem since the measurement anyway discern those

having relatively less money, and using the relative definition of poverty it can be argued that the

working age population has references not towards the young or the old, but towards this specific

group.

When measuring deprivation we have, for simplicity, chosen to use a modified approach based on

the method developed by Mack and Lansley ( 1985) in their pioneering work about consensual

poverty, defining relative deprivation as lacking 3 or more items because cannot afford which the

majority (more than 50%) considers necessary to participate in contemporary society. The

modification is that we, instead of using what the majority considers necessary, use what the

majority actually have, the same principal used by Halleröd et.al., (2006) however, there a

sophisticated index was used. Thus, we do not, as Mack and Lansley do, use peoples judgment about

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what is necessary consumption and what is not, at the same time as we escape from some of the

critic put forward against the consensual deprivation poverty measurement (McKay, 2004).

There are several reasons why deprivation should not overlap in any great extent with income

poverty. There may be errors in the measurement of the income, costs may differ between

individuals and families, and the income in the household may not be as equal as the income

measurement assumes. These are aspects the income poverty measurement hardly can take into

account, but which the deprivation measurement may do. Furthermore, the income measurement

has a short time frame, meaning that individuals having low income one year, but have had higher

incomes and even savings other years are defined as poor even though they perfectly well can live a

relatively ordinary life in the society.

In table 2 income poverty and relative deprivation among employees, self-employed with and

without employees are presented. First of all it is obvious that the rates differ dependent of what

kind of measurement that is used. The lowest poverty rate can in general be found regarding income

poverty, and the highest regarding deprivation. However, while there are substantial differences in

the rate of the employee who are poor and who are deprived there are hardly any differences

between the two measurements regarding the two categories of self-employed. This result indicates

that the overlap between the measurements should be greater among self employed than among

the employee.

Table 2: Self reported income poverty, register based income poverty and deprivation among employees, self-employed and non-working Poverty based on self

reported income Deprivation

Employee 12.1 21.7

Self employed without employees

22.4 21.9

Self-employed with employees

11.5 10.4

Total 14.8 19.8

n 560 769

To investigate the rate of overlap concretely we have employed Venn-diagrams, and from the

diagrams calculated the overlap rate, i.e. the proportion of the income poor that also is deprived,

and how many of the deprived that also is poor.

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Figure 1: Overlap between income poverty and deprivation among the whole population. In percent

Figure 2: Overlap between income poverty and deprivation among employees. In percent

Figure 3: Overlap between income poverty and deprivation among self employed without employees. In percent

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Figure 4: Overlap between income poverty and deprivation among self employed with employees. In percent As can be seen in the figures the overlap between the two measurements is quite bad, which also

was expected (see previous research: Halleröd and Larsson, 2008; Bradshaw and Finch, 2003).

Only about 8 percentage of the whole population (in the data – this is not representative for the

population since we have two subsamples) are both income poor and deprived. The corresponding

figure among the employee is 7.5 percentage, 10.2 percentage among the self employed without

employee, and only 4 percentage among the self employed with employee. In table 3 we investigate

the total overlap rate. In the best of worlds the overlap rate should be 100% for the measurement

with the lowest rate, while corresponding to the ratio between the lowest rate through the highest

rate regarding the highest rate (in the case of the total population the overlap rate should be 100

percentage regarding income poverty and 14.8/19.8=74.7 percentage regarding deprivation). This is

far from the case.

Table 3: The overlap rate Poverty based on self

reported income Deprivation

Perfect overlap

rate

Actual overlap

rate

Perfect overlap

rate

Actual overlap

rate Employee 100 62.0 55.8 34.6

Self employed without employees

97.8 45.5 100 46.6

Self employed with employees

90.4 34.8 100 38.4

All 100 57.4 74.7 42.9

As can be seen the overlap is rather low regarding all three categories. However there are differences

in the degree of lack of overlap. The worst overlap can be found among self employed with

employees (0.38), the second worst among self employed without employee (0.47) and the best

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among employee (0.62). Thus, the overlap between income poverty and deprivation is better among

the employee than among self employed, and better among self employed without employee than

among self employed with employee. If we assume that the deprivation measure is more accurate

(research has shown that deprivation correlates more strongly with other welfare problems than

income poverty (Halleröd and Larsson, 2008)), the income poverty measurement is rather

problematic when it comes to self employed (c.f. Halleröd, 1997; Bradbury, 1996) .

The influence of other factors

In the next section we will investigate the influence of other factors. The aim is twofold. We on the

one hand want to investigate if the difference between employees and self-employed still persist

when other factors are involved, and on the other hand to investigate if income poverty and

deprivation are differently related to other factors. In focus is industry of employment/activity and

personality traits. Besides these aspects we will take several background factors into account which

has shown to be of importance in previous research (see e.g. Fraser et al., 2011).

The instrument we use to investigate the personality is a short version of the Big Five (Gosling et al.,

2003; John et al., 1991), which in previous research has been used regarding entrepreneurship and

self employment (Zhao and Seibert, 2006). The Big Five collects scores on five personality traits,

presented in figure 1. Previous research has shown that entrepreneurs have higher scores on

openness and lower on emotionality (Zhao and Seibert, 2006). These personality traits may also be of

importance regarding the propensity to take risks, and risk may be related on the one hand to great

profits, but also to failure and as such to poverty. However, the self employed are a heterogeneous

group and as such personality traits should vary – and certain aspects of this variation may explain

some of the poverty risk some self employed face.

Personality traits

I Extraversion or Surgency (talkative, assertive, energetic)

II Agreeableness (good-natured, cooperative, trustful)

III Conscientiousness (orderly, responsible, dependable)

IV Emotional Stability versus Neuroticism (calm, not neurotic, not easily upset)

V Intellect or Openness (intellectual, imaginative, independent-minded)

Figure 5: The structure of personality traits in Big Five

Source: (John and Srivastava, 1999)

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There are some discussions about the personality traits and income (Bowles et al., 2001), as well as

among the poor more specific, often related to the discussions about culture of poverty

(Salling and Harvey, 1981). It has been argued that man develops cognition and motivation through

interaction with the environment, and since it is supposed that the environment of the poor are

different the poor also are supposed to have different personality traits in general, mainly related to

a lack of achieved status in society (Salling and Harvey, 1981). In the study performed by Salling and

Harvey it was shown that the poor actually also have a personality trait similar to what has been

proposed in the theory of culture of poverty, such as insecurity, failure avoidance/risk reducing

inclination and lack of self consciousness, and in a more recent study it was shown that personality

and behaviour traits are predictors of earnings – which is of relevance regarding poverty (Bowles et

al., 2001).

Even though the research we have used to construct the personality traits on, based on the big five

(see e.g. Gosling et al., 2003), to some extent differ from the method used in the studies presented

above, it seems as that the personality trait presented regarding the poor are the opposite to the

personality traits previous studies has shown that are typical for self employed. Once again it may be

of importance to say that not every poor or every self employed have the same personality trait –

only that some personality trait seem to be more common among the self employed and other

among the poor.

We start the analyses by investigating the impact of the industry one is employed in or active as a

self employed in. This is a potential important area of research, since the in-work poverty literature

to some extent has argued that this new old phenomenon can be related to the deindustrialization

and the development of a post fordist mode of production during the last 30 to 40 years (Andress

and Lohmann, 2008). If this is correct in-work poverty should in general be found among low skilled

service sector workers. Furthermore, even the poor self employed should in general be found among

these sections on the labour market. In this paper we have only done a rather crude investigation.

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Table 5: Poverty in different industries in per cent Poverty based on self

reported income Register based poverty measurement

Deprivation

Agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing

34.9 32.4 21.7

Manufacturing 9.3 13.8 17.0

Construction 15.7 15.3 16.8

Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles, motorcycles and personal and household goods

17.0 22.3 21.0

Hotels and restaurants 34.2 37.7 27.7

Transport, storage and communication

14.9 12.0 18.2

Financial intermediation 0 4.8 3.6

Real estate, renting and business activities

9.3 14.6 12.5

Public administration and defence; compulsory social security

3.8 5.3 10.4

Education 10.6 13.4 19.2

Health and social work 8.0 12.8 18.6

Other community, social and personal service activities

21.2 34.7 28.1

other 37.5 43.5 38.9

Total 13.9 18.1 18.1

n 513 851 691

In table 5 we have marked the industries where the poor and the deprived are overrepresented.

There are some similarities, however also differences. Overrepresentation of poverty and deprivation

can be found in agriculture, wholesale and retail, hotel and restaurants, other community, social and

personal service activities. Thus, we can conclude that these industries are rather poor-prone. Even

though we here have a rather crude measurement regarding the industry and the theoretical

reasoning related to post fordism, this result is in line with the argument that in-work poverty as an

old new social phenomenon is more common in industries run by a post-fordist mode of production.

Thus, the poverty rate is in general low in manufacturing (representing the fordist mode of

production), while high in industries run by the private service sector where profit mainly is a matter

face to face interaction between employee and customer, and where the costs of the employees

constitute a large proportion of the turnover. Deprivation is overrepresented among more industries

than income poverty. This indicates that relative deprivation is less related to particularly industries.

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Table 6: Employee and self employed by industries in per cent (based on data which includes non-working) Employee Self employed without

employees Self employed with

employees

Agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing

27.0 54.0 19.0

Manufacturing 64.9 20.7 14.4

Construction 26.0 42.3 31.8

Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles, motorcycles and personal and household goods

38.2 30.9 30.7

Hotels and restaurants 32.9 17.1 50.0

Transport, storage and communication

53.6 26.5 19.9

Financial intermediation 83.6 9.1 7.3

Real estate, renting and business activities

38.8 38.8 22.3

Public administration and defence; compulsory social security

97.4 2.6 0.0

Education 86.3 7.8 5.9

Health and social work 83.7 11.0 5.3

Other community, social and personal service activities

24.6 62.1 13.3

Other 40.0 46.7 13.3

Total 50.8 30.5 18.7

n 1951 1173 717

In Table 6 we have employed similar analyses however with focus on employees and self-employed

instead of poverty. The aim is to investigate whether self-employed in particularly high degree work

in industries with high poverty/deprivation rates. If that is the case, higher poverty rate can possible

be explain by what kind of industries that are “self-employed-prone”. Starting with employees it can

be seen that regarding income poverty the employees are overrepresented in only one poverty

prone industry, while deprivation is in as many as three. This may be one of the reasons why the

deprivation rate is higher among employees than the income poverty measurements (see table 2).

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Proceeding to the self-employed without employees it can be seen that this category are

overrepresented regarding five out of six of the poverty-prone industries when it comes to income

poverty. However, the self-employed without employee are only (relatively speaking)

overrepresented in four out of eight poverty-prone industries regarding relative deprivation. Even

though this interesting result cannot fully explain why the self-employed without employees have so

high income poverty rates while relatively low deprivation rate (in relation to employees), the results

anyway must be understood as a piece of the puzzle.

Lastly, the self-employed with employees are overrepresented regarding five out of seven poverty-

prone industries regarding income poverty, and four out of eight regarding deprivation.

Next we will investigate personality traits among the poor and between employees and self-

employed. As can be seen the poor have lower scores on extraversion, conscientiousness and

openness, and higher scores on agreeableness and emotional. It can furthermore be seen that the

differences between poverty/deprivation and no poverty/no deprivation is about the same except

openness where the poor and the non-poor do not have statistically significant different scores

regarding poverty based on register data.

Table 7: Personality traits among poor and non-poor

Poverty based on self reported income Deprivation

Mean Mean poor Not poor Dep. Not dep. Extraversion 4.9133 5.2133 4.8275 5.237 Agreeableness 2.7593 2.6540 2.7767 2.6486 Conscientiousness 5.2927 5.5150 5.2574 5.5388 Emotional 3.1523 2.8466 3.1984 2.8155 Openness 5.2157 5.3862 5.2460 5.3773

Note: bold indicate significantly differences where employee is the reference category (p<0.05). When it comes to the differences between employees and self employed it can be seen that the self

employed without employees have significant higher scores regarding agreeableness and openness

compared with employees, while employees have higher scores regarding conscientiousness. No

differences could be found regarding extraversion and emotional.

The self employed with employees have statistically significant different scores on all five personality

traits compared with employees. The self employed with employees have in general higher scores

regarding extraversion, agreeableness and openness, while lower regarding conscientiousness and

emotional. There are also differences between self employed with and without employees regarding

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emotional where the self employed with employees has substantially lower scores, and extraversion

where the self employed with employees have higher scores.

Table 8: Personality traits among employees and self employed

Employee Self employed without employee Self employed with employee

Mean Mean Mean Extraversion 5.1030 5.1568 5.3390 Agreeableness 2.6236 2.7138 2.7564 Conscientiousness 5.5453 5.4500 5.4077 Emotional 2.9066 2.9144 2.7790 Openness 5.3059 5.4016 5.4779

Note: bold indicate significantly differences where employee is the reference category (p<0.05).

There are significant differences between self employed with and without employee regarding

Extraversion and Emotional.

These results are indeed interesting and should be analyzed further. However, in this paper we will

stay by comparing the personality traits among the poor and between self employed and employees.

It can be concluded that there are no perfect match between either self employed with and without

employees or employees regarding the personality traits of the poor/deprived. However, the

poor/deprived, regardless of measurement, in general have higher scores on agreeableness, which

both categories of self employed also have. There is also coherence between the personality traits of

the employee and the poor. Poverty based on self reported income and deprivation correlates with

lower scores of extraversion.

Multivariate analyses

Can industry and personality trait explain differences in poverty/deprivation between self employed

and employees? To investigate this we have employed several regressions, and included background

factors (sex, working hours, education, and origin of country). We have used the same strategy so far

used, i.e. first we have employed multinomial logistic regression to investigate how these factors

correlated with employees, self employed without employees and self employed with employees.

Then we have employed logistic regressions to investigate correlation with poverty/deprivation. As

can be seen in Table 9 self employed are generally older, are men in greater extent, and also works in

risk industries (industries where poverty and/or deprivation are overrepresented). It can furthermore

be seen that self employed with employees in greater extent have different character than the

employees compared with self employed without employees. Self employed with employees in

general have higher scores on extraversion than both self employed without employees and

employees. Self employed with employees are also in greater extent men and do more often work

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full time. An interesting result here is that self employed without employees in lesser extent than

employees work full time. This indicates that some of the self employed without employee probably

has their own business to be able to work less.

Table 9: Multinomial logistic regression Employee

(Ref) Self employed without employee

Self employed with employee

Age 1.038* 1.034*

Personality traits

Extraversion 1.039 1.259*

Agreeableness 1.057 1.183*

Conscientiousness 0.910* 0.876*

Emotional 1.056 0.961

Openness 1.242* 1.224*

Sex

Men 2.250* 4.282*

Women (ref)

Working hours

Full time

Part time 1.934* 0.646*

Risk Industries 1.266* 1.471*

Education

Elementary 1.661* 1.610*

Vocational secondary 1.873* 1.938*

Theoretically secondary 1.341* 2.187*

College/university without exam 1.907* 2.169*

College/university with exam <3 years

1.359 1.729*

Original country

Sweden

Other 1.111 1.201

Note: bold indicate significant differences between self employed with and without employee (p<0.05). *=p<0.05.

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Investigating the poverty/deprivation measure we have employed several regressions, which are of

greater length. To make the analyses easier we have made a summary of the results, presented in

table 10. The first thing to notice is that income poverty and deprivation correlates with slightly

different factors. To start with the main interesting results, self employed without employees are in

greater extent income poor and deprived than employees. However, in the multivariate analyses

there are no differences in deprivation between the self employed without employees and

employees.

Table 10: Summary of the results from the logistic regressions. Only variables where there are significant correlations are presented. Income Poverty Deprivation

Employee (ref.)

Self employed without employee

2.966 1.118

Self employed with employee

1.366 0.545

Sex (women) 1.592

Age 0.980

Part time 1.927

Agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing

3.552

Construction

Transport, storage and communication

Financial intermediation 0.216

Real estate, renting and business activities

0.661

Theoretically secondary 0.663 0.653

College/university with exam <3 years

0.621

College/university with exam >3 years

0.219 0.519

Not born in Sweden 3.140 3.101

Extraversion 0.846 0.792

Conscientiousness 0.829

Emotional 1.151 1.197

Openness 1.133

Note: Bold indicate significant lower (p<0.05) than employee

Furthermore, self employed with employees have lesser odds ratio regarding deprivation than

employees, while there are no significant differences regarding the income poverty measurements.

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The relative deprived are in greater extent women, while there are no differences between men and

women regarding income poverty. The same results hold for part-time. There are also differences

regarding industries. To work in the agriculture implies a higher odds ratio to be income poor, while

not deprived. There are furthermore substantial differences regarding industries that are protective

against poverty and deprivation. The level of education seems to be more important regarding

deprivation than regarding income poverty. Or more correctly, it takes a higher level of education to

have a significant lower odds ratio of deprivation than income poverty. Personality traits also seems

to be of more importance regarding deprivation, where all five personality traits differs between

those who are deprived compared with those who are not, while it is only extraversion and

emotional which matters regarding income poverty.

Conclusion

In the present paper we have presented statistics from a new data set valid for Sweden, collected

during the autumn of 2011. The aim with the data collection is to investigate different aspect of self

employment. In this paper we have been able to show that self employed have higher income

poverty rates than employees, however only if not having employees. We have furthermore been

able to show that the self employed are not more deprived than employees independent of having

employees or not, while self employed with employees actually are less deprived than the

employees. We have also been able to show that the two measurement income and relative

deprivation to some extent correlates to different factors. This was however not unsurprising due to

results in previous research. What is rather new is that the overlap between the two measurements

used here is better among employees than among self employed, and worst regarding self employed

with employees. In the future we will be able to investigate income poverty when the income

measurement is based on self reported data and on register data – an important issue due to the fact

that comparative research today are conducted with data from countries using self reported and

other countries using register data.

Other interesting results we have found is that industry matters to a great deal, and in a way that

indicate that in-work poverty are related to the development of a post-fordist mode of production,

even though in-work poverty also existed during the fordist period, for example during the 1970’s,

and may not be such a new/old social phenomenon after all (Airio, 2008). However, the

measurement here is far to crude. This is an issue that has to be more carefully investigated. The self

employed are a substantially more heterogeneous group than what we have investigated here, not

the least regarding what industry they are active in. Furthermore, theoretically an important industry

has to be measured in a less aggregated sense that what has be done here.

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We have also found interesting differences in personality traits, something which also need to be

developed more. This is the case not the least theoretically. That the self employed are more prone

to take risks seems self evidence, but we have found results that indicate that the differences are

more complex than this. We also found substantial differences between poor/deprived and non

poor/non deprived regarding personality traits. However, so far we have no good theoretical

explanation to this except the theory of culture of poverty. A lot of more work is needed regarding

this theme, not the least to relate this psychological measurement with social/sociological aspects.

Finally, we have found some support regarding results from previous research. The self employed do

have high poverty rates. However, the results we have found indicate that these results are

conditioned, and that the self employed do not in general have higher rate of deprivation than

employee. Not all self employed are poor, and self employed are a very heterogeneous group. In

future research we will try to find out more exactly who the working poor self employed really are

and why they are poor.

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