Legalization of Self-employed People’s Activities in Russia: Incentives and Barriers

This work was carried out by a qualitative method through the collection of interviews and analysis of the information received. Informants were recruited using the snowball method. A total of 34 interviews were conducted with self-employed people from various professions. The analysis was carried out using the selective coding method in connection with predefined topics in the interview. The implementation of this work pursued two goals. Firstly, an increase in the body of knowledge about which motives and which logics move the self-employed in their decisions regarding the legalization of their activities. Secondly, this study can be considered as preparation for a larger-scale quantitative study of the self-employed and their relationship to the legalization of their activities. The work was set 4 tasks: 1) Identify the main problems faced by self-employed in their activities, and ways to solve them 2) Identify incentives and barriers (institutional, financial, psychological, social) that promote and impede the legalization of self-employed 3) To identify the level of awareness of the self-employed about the possibilities of legalization 4) To identify differences in perception when changing the status of legalization (from unregistered self-employed to registered) As a result of the study, with respect to the self-employed, all three paradoxes of the informal economy were confirmed. The self-employed’s perception of their activities was also described, effective sources of information for the self-employed were identified, the reasons for updating the information about the law by the self-employed were identified, unexpected or important points for future research were described. Based on this work, the author proposes to continue the study of this topic in order to identify the degree of significance of certain legalization motives found during the study.