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For further information about definitions and sources and methodology please see below at the end of the page.
Please make use of the interactive filtering options to highlight data by country, years, age groups, and gender.
Self-employment is one of the categories of the status in employment according to the latest version of the International Standard Classification of Status in Employment (ICSE-93). Status in employment refers to the type of explicit or implicit contract of employment the person has with other persons or organizations. The basic criteria used to define the groups of the classification are the type of economic risk and the type of authority over establishments and other workers which the job incumbents have or will have.
The self-employment rate (self-employment-to- total employment ratio) expresses the number of persons who are self-employed as a percent of the total employment, or its sub-group as defined, for example, by age and/or sex.
For more information, refer to the ILO concepts and definitions page.
The data for the charts below is sourced from these data tables:
(1) “Employment by sex and status in employment -- ILO modelled estimates, Nov. 2020 (thousands) | Annual”, table code “EMP_2EMP_SEX_STE_NB_A”;
(2) “Employment by age and status in employment -- ILO modelled estimates, Nov. 2020 (thousands) | Annual”, table code “EMP_2EMP_AGE_STE_NB_A”.
The data can be accessed here: https://ilostat.ilo.org/data/.
Warning about data quality: some of the data may be based on imputed observations. Imputed observations are not based on national data, are subject to high uncertainty and should not be used for country comparisons or rankings. For more information about the estimation and, where relevant, projection methodology, please refer to the ILOSTAT page on modelled estimates and projections.