The Determinants of False Self-Employment: A Survey of Polish Enterprises

ABSTRACT

The main goal of this article is to advance the emergent research on tax evasion in Poland in the form of false self-employment (FSE), in particular to identify its causes. The dependent character of some self-employed workers is a big problem in the Polish economy, which has been completely unexplored because of the lack of available data. In this article, we use data from a survey of Polish companies. Our empirical results show the highest prevalence of FSE in construction and to lesser extent in the services and retail, at micro and small firms, and at firms whose owners or managers are characterized by lower tax morality.

KEYWORDS:

• False self-employment
• Poland
• shadow economy

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J21
• J46
• H26

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Other synonyms for “bogus” and “false” are “sham,” “involuntary,” “misclassified,” and “fake” (Williams and Horodnic 2019). There is no clear distinction between terms such as dependent and bogus self-employment, which are often used interchangeably. In particular, when a worker who previously performed tasks as a purely dependent employee is then forced to register as self-employed in order to continue the same work for the same employer, this is defined as dependent self-employment (Thörnquist 2013) or bogus self-employment (Wickham and Bobek 2016). By contrast, according to the International Labor Organization framework, dependent self-employment should be categorized separately from bogus self-employment (for details, see ILO 2018). In this paper, we use the terms “dependent,” “false,” and “bogus” self-employment interchangeably.

2. In the remainder of the article, FSE is based on this assumption.

3. In particular, 16 regional dummies were included, which correspond to 16 voivodships in Poland. A list of voivodships is in Table 2.

4. According to Eurostat, 17% of those who are economically dependent self-employed work in construction (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Self-employment_statistics#of_the_economically_dependent_self-employed_in_the_construction_sector/, accessed March 13, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

The study was supported by the National Science Center in Poland (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) under Grant No. 2018/02/x/hs4/00441: False self-employment as an element of the shadow economy in Poland. Identification of sizes and causes.