Employment mobility in small business between 1992 and 2001

Writers on structural change in the economy present the expansion of small business as one contributor to the process, but empirical analysis in Eastern Europe provides little support for this. The study's initial hypothesis was that the self-employed can change occupations more easily than the employed and thereby facilitate the structure-change process. Analysis of individual-level data from the Central Statistical Office labour survey, however, suggests that on Hungary's labour market, which has traditionally low mobility, the frequency of occupation change among the self-employed exceeded that among the employed at most in the early years of the 1990s.