Proceedings of 8th European Assembly on telework (Telework2001)

58As Table 7 shows, overall self-employment rates are rather high in countries such as Italy, Spainand Ireland and low for instance in Denmark, Sweden and Germany. This also applies for theshare <strong>of</strong> freelancers (self-employed without employees; excluding farming). The development inthe last decade shows great variation, with Sweden (+1.5%), Germany (+1.4%), Finland (+0.8%),Denmark and the UK (both +0.6%) leading the field. Spain (-1.3%) and France (-0.4%), on theother hand, have decreasing shares <strong>of</strong> freelancers 6 .As an indicator for the stringency <strong>of</strong> labour markets with regard to the ‘contract’ dimension <strong>of</strong>work arrangements, we used the Employment Protection Legislation Indicator developed by theOECD [16]. This indicator was developed to be able to compare the effect <strong>of</strong> regulatory labourmarket regimes between countries. Main ingredients are subindicators measuring [15: 41]• procedural requirements (refers to the process that has to be followed from the decision to lay<strong>of</strong>f a worker to the actual termination <strong>of</strong> the contract)• notice and severance pay (refers to three tenure periods beyond any trial period, dismissed ongrounds <strong>of</strong> poor performance or individual dismissal, without fault. The tenure periods are: ninemonths; four years; and 20 years)• prevailing standards <strong>of</strong> and penalties for ‘unfair’ dismissals (includes the conditions that identifyan unfair dismissal)• ‘objective’ reasons under which a fixed-term contract could be <strong>of</strong>fered;• the maximum number <strong>of</strong> successive renewals <strong>of</strong> fixed-term contracts;• the maximum cumulated duration <strong>of</strong> a fixed-term contract.Table 8:Employment protection legislation: OECD Indicator for 19981998 7Denmark 1.5Finland 2.1France 3.1Germany 2.8Ireland 1.0Italy 3.3Netherlands 2.4Spain 3.2Sweden 2.4United Kingdom 0.5Data: OECD Source: [16]6 1990 fi gures for freelancers in Finland, Italy and Sweden are not available from this source. For this reason,estimates were used. For this we assumed that the development in time <strong>of</strong> the ratio <strong>of</strong> freelancers to overallself-employed in these countries was the same as in the average <strong>of</strong> the 11 EU countries for witch data isavailable. Testing this assumption for the countries for witch 1988 data is available showed a very high degree<strong>of</strong> congormity.7 The index value can be between 0 and 6.