So yes - in practice, so-called self-employment is a great sink for many people who are really just temping. It's presented as being terribly entrepreneurial, but the reality is that PLCs are increasibly buying in short-term help when they need it rather than developing extended relationships. At the same time permanent positions are being converted into 'freelance opportunities.'
That latest stats I could find [PDF] suggest that around 3 million are self-employed.
To be fair, insolvency figures are running at about 10-15,000 a year, which suggests that most of that 3 million are doing enough work to stay afloat. Tax breaks also make survival easier. So it's not all bad news.
But I'd guess around half a million to a million are somewhat precariously self-employed, rather than being propelled at full tilt by the glorious headwinds of free enterprise, and should really be counted as part-time rather than full-time workers.
The difficult thing in studying this would be to find objective statistical measures that would deal with the real amount of work available and carried out - but we can certainly compare numbers of self-employed. I suspect they're fairly numerous in France, as in the UK, and for the same reasons. The narrative about them is, of course, as you say, dynamic, go-getting entrepreneurs blah. In how many cases it's really a start-up rather than a finish-up it's hard to say.
In this "Northern Periphery" - as the EU calls it - microbusiness / self-employment are increasingly the rule, rather than the exception, and the proprietors of these businesses carry a lot of votes.
Our initiative promotes the use of:
(a) "Guarantee Societies" - allowing micro-businesses to club together both to engage in major procurements and to mutually guarantee bilateral credits; and
(b) "Capital Partnerships" - ie revenue/production sharing partnerships between investor and user of investment - which allow quasi Equity "micro-investment" (as opposed to micro credit) to be raised irrespective of the legal form of the microbusiness.
I believe that the big corporations are becoming increasingly "hollowed out" as most of the best people leave.
"Linked/networked small" will be the new "big" IMHO. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
