Duration of self-employment in developing countries: Evidence from small enterprises in Zimbabwe

The duration of self-employment is an important policy consideration in developing countries. We use data from a sample of the self-employed in Zimbabwe to compute hazard rates by location and economic sector of the activity. We partition the data by date of entry to assess the impact of economic liberalization measures. Our results show that cost of finance, along with location and sector to be important variables in explaining duration. We then partition our sample in order to control for the effects of location, year of entry and type of activity. Our sub-samples thus consist of individuals facing the same history of macroeconomic trends in similar locations and activities. The results show that personal characteristics are significant in explaining differences between individuals in the duration of self- employment.