It's an interesting topic. Here's a couple of sites that list self-employment stats by country (at the bottom). The data differs but the trends are the same--the more developed the country, the fewer self-employed. Countries like India and Niger have the most self-employed, upwards of 80 percent, while counties like the U.S. hover around 6 percent. Both sites point to an overall self-employment rate of around 46 percent. But this number is heavily skewed by the 80 percent average self-employment in low income countries versus 12 percent for high income countries. China sits in the middle at 46.5 percent.
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I was self-employed for 34 years when I sold my businesses and retired. I had three small retail stores and averaged a dozen employees.
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I have mixed feelings about self-employment. I was very organized. I wrote my own point of sale system for our cash registers and inventory management--yet I still worked all the time and always had tasks hanging over my head. There was always payroll to be completed, bills to pay, and all the paperwork courtesy of the U.S. government and the state of California. When things went wrong it was all on me. I paid well above minimum wage but employees were still a major pain. If money was tight, I didn't get paid.
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About ten years in I was already sick of business, so I went back to school and got a elementary school teaching credential. For the following 20 years I hired a manager to help run the day to day business and I became a school teacher.
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I found teaching school much more rewarding. It's sort of close to being self employment, because there is little oversite or direction. Two 30-minute observations per year by the principal is not exactly overbearing. The rest of the time you are on your own.
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I retired at 55 with 20 years of teaching and 34 years in business. I sold my two remaining stores (sold the other when I started teaching). Both were turn-key, established businesses. All systems tried and tested. One lasted a little over a year, the other made it about 5 years. Many people "think" they would like to be self-employed, few are suited for it. I'm sure glad I got out while I could, because a big chain moved in a few years after my old stores went under.
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Global self employment stats
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https://www.statista.com/chart/18908/self-employed-workers-by-country/
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https://luisazhou.com/blog/how-many-americans-are-self-employed/#:~:text=Self%2Demployment%20by%20country,-(OECD%2C%20World%20Bank&text=What's%20the%20percentage%20of%20self,number%2038%20among%2039%20countries.