Self-employment and unemployment relationship in Romania – Insights by age, education and gender

We check on the short term if self-employment in Romania influences unemployment and vice versa. Age, education and gender characteristics treat both variables, and self-employment considers both cases with and without employees. The objective is to look at the job creation and unemployment reduction in quarterly variation during the 1999Q1–2017Q3 period. On autoregressive models, we apply the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) procedure, detailed by Giles (2011), to assess for Granger Causality. We found for unemployment rates a push effect in the self-employment rate for adults and youth with low education level to self-employment without employees’ rate for adults and self-employment with employees’ rate for old adults. We establish a ‘Schumpeter’ effect for the adult with a low level of education self-employment to unemployment, for adults’ males with tertiary education and self-employed, and older adults self-employed without employees to unemployment. We conclude that unemployment work as an inclusion mechanism for some vulnerable groups but inefficient for others. Self-employment with employees is less diversified, indicating a high-risk aversion and low start-up effect. In general, the labour market presents a unidirectional flexibility effect.