A typological proposal for self-employment in Chile and Spain

The seminar will focus on presenting the results of a comparative typological analysis of self-employed workers between Chile and Spain, the aim of which is to establish similarities and differences in the patterns of configuration of the various profiles of self-employed workers, conceptually delimiting self-employment and establishing as a hypothesis its stratification and differentiated distribution in the territory. Therefore, the aim is to provide theoretical and empirical elements for a sociological analysis that sheds light on the social reality of the group studied. The methodology is structural and articulated by combining two multivariate analysis techniques. First, a multiple correspondence analysis was carried out to determine the main differentiating factors of self-employment, and then a classification analysis was applied to obtain the typology of self-employment. We worked with data from the National Employment Survey 2019, 2020 and 2021 for Chile and the Labour Force Survey 2019, 2020 and 2021 for Spain.

Finally, two main factors are obtained from the data, labelled as: “socio-occupational level” and a second factor as “degree of autonomy”. These two factors allowed us to generate three types of profiles for self-employment in Chile and Spain: high stratum; middle stratum; and agricultural stratum.