The International Labour Organization counts any person working for more than one hour per week as being employed. Therefore, self-employment rates tend to be very high in some countries, particularly in places where small farms are important and all members of the family partake in some form of agricultural work. While self-employment can be seen as a survival strategy in poorer countries where people have no other means of generating an income, it can also be a mark of creativity and entrepreneurship in more developed economies.
The most recent data released by the OECD shows that more than half Colombia's workforce is self-employed with labor informality, income inequality and non-regular contracts widespread across the country. In Europe, countries in the south such as Greece (34.1 percent) tend to have the highest self-employment rates while in the north, especially across Scandinavia, the proportion of workers being their own bosses is far lower. Elsewhere, the self-employment rate stands at 10.6 percent in Japan and just 6.4 percent in the United States.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
