Self-employment. The Case of Spain

This article is a study on self-employment in Spain, and particularly on a target group: worker-members of small limited liability companies. Through the descriptive analysis of a sample of workers extracted from the Continuous Work History Sample (CWHS), on the one hand, we evaluate the con-ditions which determine the decision to become your own employer, and on the other hand, we reflect a number of socio-demographic characteristics related to the working life of our target group. The most relevant result demonstrates that worker-members of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can be differentiated as an independent group with its own features, despite the economic literature has usually studied them within the self-employed workers' collective. This group represents about a quarter of the totality of the Spanish self-employed work, thus becoming a very important part of the national economy in the wealth and employment creation.