Being Entrepreneur as a part of humans’ life – who wins and who fails? Relative survival rate models.

Being entrepreneur is one of the phases in men and women life time. In my paper I try to describe the basic demographic characteristics of entrepreneurs (self-employed). Who is the winner and who fails and how it influences his lifetime. Data come from retrospective survey of micro enterprises in one region of Poland. Some of entrepreneurs give up their businesses naturally without any reason or financial difficulties. This article discusses the application of models for relative survival rates in the evaluation of entrepreneurs’ failure forecast models in Poland. The relative survival rate is a ratio of the overall survival rate and the expected rate for individuals belonging to a homogeneous reference population. Entrepreneurs’ life from the moment of diagnosis (loss) to their „death” (liquidation) or the moment of censoring was observed. The remaining subjects from the analysed sample served as a reference population. Applying the models for relative survival rate served as a tool to assess the entrepreneurs’ failure risk analysis. According to descriptive analysis there are more men than women starting their entrepreneurs careers and they are more successful. Highly educated entrepreneurs and those for whom it was the only source of money have higher chances of survival. All analysis will be compared to EU countries.