Garzón: Fewer self-employed in richer countries, Spain has 3.4 million

Fewer self-employed, richer countries: the data Garzón doesn't qualify

Economist Eduardo Garzón claimed on X that "the richer a country is, the fewer self-employed it has," presenting it as a fact, not an opinion. He responded to a YouTuber, accusing them of ignorance and a desire to argue something he deemed "empirically proven." This statement has fueled an ongoing debate: does the percentage of self-employment measure a country's wealth or its precariousness?

Below the graph, a specific scenario is recounted by a self-employed individual from the thread. A professional with enough clients to hire another person chooses not to. It's not a lack of work: hiring is perceived as a risk to one's health and assets. "Better alone than in bad company with the Tax Agency" is the implied reasoning.

How many self-employed in Norway, Denmark, and Germany

The percentages presented reveal a clear pattern: **Norway** has 4.6% self-employed, **Denmark** 7.4%, and **Sweden** 10.7%. The Netherlands falls in between with 8.1%, and Germany with 8.6%.

• Norway: 4.6%
• Denmark: 7.4%
• Netherlands: 8.1%
• Germany: 8.6%
• Sweden: 10.7%

In Spain, there are **3.4 million RETA affiliates**, of which approximately 2.26 million are individuals and around 1.14 million are corporate entities, representing **33.2% of the total**, according to April 2025 data. The immediate interpretation is straightforward: economies with higher per capita income have fewer self-employed workers. The discussion begins right after.

Company size explains the data better than country income

The most common argument here doesn't deny the figure but shifts the focus. Wealthy countries aren't characterized by a lack of self-employed individuals, but by a dominance of larger companies, where the administrator—who also contributes as self-employed—employs hundreds or thousands of salaried workers. In a company of a thousand employees, the ratio is one self-employed person per thousand workers. The percentage naturally falls due to arithmetic.

Spain represents the opposite case. **99% of the business fabric consists of micro-enterprises**, which tilts the balance towards self-employment. This leads to the argument that the problem isn't the abundance of self-employed individuals, but the difficulty in ceasing to be one: growing, hiring, and expanding the business remains a statistical exception.

Is the self-employment rate a cause or consequence of precariousness?

The second point of disagreement concerns direction. Some analyses consider the high rate a **consequence, not a cause**: people become self-employed because there's no other option, because available jobs are insufficient or unappealing, and the alternative is unemployment or the informal economy. From this perspective, boasting fewer self-employed individuals implies more stable employment, unless the jobs replacing self-employment are short-term contracts with fancy names.

Some attribute the percentage drop in Spain to a statistical effect: more registered employees through figures like the fixed-discontinuous contract, which inflate the denominator without changing the market reality. Others point out that a decrease in self-employed individuals, by itself, admits four different explanations: they've been hired, they've emigrated, they've passed a civil service exam, or they've moved into the informal economy. Only one of these is good news.

Why Spanish self-employed don't hire: Personal Income Tax vs. Limited Company

The transition from working alone to having staff is presented as a fiscal and bureaucratic hurdle. International comparisons often use administrative categories that don't miccionan the same thing: in the United States, operating through a limited liability company is common, while in Spain, setting up a limited company without employees remains expensive, as taxation is ultimately handled through **Personal Income Tax (IRPF)**.

Added to this is the cost for the self-employed themselves. Some argue in the thread that the additional revenue attributed to self-employed individuals that year, around **7 billion euros**, distributed among all contributors, amounts to about **1,800 euros per person**. This is the basis for the discussion on whether the issue is a lack of desire to grow or the cost of trying.

North Korea, Cuba, and Pentagon contractors

The debate has gone to extremes seeking counterexamples. In **North Korea**, there are no self-employed individuals, and the standard of living doesn't invite copying the model; Cuba also doesn't improve the statistic. It's noteworthy that the graph places South Korea in a worse position than Spain, a result that's hard to justify. At the other extreme is the United States, where a significant portion of self-employment is through contractors working for large corporations and government agencies like NASA or the Pentagon.

A figure is circulating about the origin of high-skilled jobs, suggesting that most new self-employed individuals are migrant workers, according to a journalistic report cited without comparable data. And hovering over the entire picture is the statistic that breaks the narrative in both directions: **one in three Spanish self-employed individuals is a corporate entity**, meaning they have a company behind them. If the graph mixes them with the plumber working alone, the international comparison doesn't measure what it claims to, and the conclusion that fewer self-employed equals more wealth loses its firm footing.