자영업과 실업 간 관계에 대한 재검토 : 자영업 내부 이질성과 동태적 반응을 중심으로

초록

This study aims to re-examine the relationship between self-employment and unemployment by empirically assessing the limitations of treating self-employment as a single proxy for entrepreneurial activity. Existing studies have explained the self-employment?unemployment relationship primarily through the refugee effect, whereby rising unemployment induces entry into self-employment, and the entrepreneurial effect, whereby an increase in self-employment leads to a reduction in unemployment. However, such approaches assume that self-employment is a homogeneous economic activity, which may obscure important variations within the sector. When substantial heterogeneity exists within self-employment, aggregate measures of self-employment may be insufficient to fully identify its relationship with unemployment. To address this limitation, this study utilizes seasonally adjusted employment data by employment status in Korea and distinguishes between employers and own-account workers. It employs a difference-based dynamic regression model that reflects the lag structure of vector autoregression (VAR), together with impulse response function (IRF) analysis, to examine the dynamic relationship between self-employment and unemployment. The empirical results show that static regression coefficients and Wald tests do not provide strong statistical evidence of differences across self-employment types. However, the impulse response analysis reveals that the responses of different types of self-employment to the same unemployment shock evolve differently in both direction and magnitude over time. This suggests that, despite underlying heterogeneity, such differences may be averaged out or offset at the aggregate level, making them difficult to detect using conventional regression approaches. These findings highlight the limitations of interpreting the self-employment?unemployment relationship as a simple linear relationship. An increase in unemployment may induce entry into self-employment, but this does not necessarily translate into job creation. Likewise, increases in self-employment may have limited effects on reducing unemployment if they are primarily driven by subsistence or own-account activities. Therefore, the relationship between self-employment and unemployment should be understood not in terms of the mere existence of a relationship, but in terms of interactions shaped by the heterogeneity of self-employment and its dynamic response structure. This study contributes to the literature by addressing the limitations of treating self-employment as a homogeneous concept and by emphasizing the importance of incorporating internal heterogeneity and dynamic response structures in the analysis. From a policy perspective, the findings suggest that self-employment policies should move beyond a focus on aggregate expansion and instead consider the qualitative composition and structural differences within self-employment.

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