Informal entrepreneurs have been viewed variously as reluctant participants in such endeavors doing so out of economic necessity because of their exclusion from formal work and welfare (structuralist theory), or as willing entrepreneurs who voluntarily exit the formal economy either as a rational economic decision (neo-liberal theory) or as social actors who do not agree with the formal rules and regulations of the state (neo-institutional theory). The aim of this paper is to evaluate these competing theorizations of entrepreneurs’ motives for participating in the informal sector. Reporting evidence from a 2019 Eurobarometer survey involving 27,565 face-to-face interviews in 28 European countries, the finding is that five percent are reluctant participants, twenty percent are willing participants doing so as a rational economic decision, 21 percent are willing participants doing so because of their disagreement with the rules and 54 percent do so for a mixture of these motives. A logistic regression analysis reveals who is more likely to engage in informal entrepreneurship and who is significantly more likely to do so for each motive. The theoretical and policy implications are then discussed.

中文翻译：

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评估企业家参与欧洲非正规部门的动机

非正规企业家被不同程度地视为出于经济需要而不愿参与此类努力的参与者，因为他们被排除在正规工作和福利之外（结构主义理论），或者被视为自愿退出正规经济的企业家，或者作为理性的经济决策（neo -自由主义理论）或作为不同意国家正式规章制度的社会行为者（新制度理论）。本文的目的是评估企业家参与非正规部门动机的这些相互竞争的理论。报告来自 2019 年欧洲晴雨表调查的证据，该调查涉及 28 个欧洲国家的 27,565 次面对面访谈，结果是 5% 的参与者不情愿，20% 的参与者愿意这样做，这是一个理性的经济决策，21% 的参与者愿意这样做是因为他们不同意这些规则，而 54% 的参与者是出于这些动机的混合。逻辑回归分析揭示了谁更有可能从事非正式创业，以及谁更有可能在每种动机下这样做。然后讨论了理论和政策影响。