Paper short abstract:

Home-Based Enterprises (HBE) account for 100 million employments around the world. Using a mixed method approach, this paper suggests that strong government support can enhance HBE performance on economic efficiency, working conditions and social equity indicators, thus promoting decent work.

Paper long abstract:

Home-based enterprises (HBEs) are a major and growing component of the informal sector, accounting for 100 million employments around the world. Policies towards HBEs are fundamentally based on four more approaches: dualist, which proposes repressive policies against HBEs, perceiving it as a means of preserving poverty and slowing economic growth; structuralist, which argues for weak supporting policies aimed at reinforcing HBEs associations, in order to enhance their negotiating power and ultimately avoid capitalist exploitation; neoliberal, which promotes HBEs by way of its legalisation and exposure to the free market without government intervention, and more recently, co-production, which promote strong support from local policies as a means of enhancing HBEs productivity. Both qualitative and quantitative research regarding the impact of different policy approaches on HBE performance are scarce. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by operationalizing concepts, building HBE performance indicators and evaluating the impact of competing policy approaches. A mixed-method approach is used to interpret primary data; thematic analysis to examine 30 in-depth interviews, and multiple linear regressions to analyse a random survey of 407 HBEs in Santiago de Chile. The empirical results obtained from studying HBEs in Santiago de Chile suggest a positive association between the amount of government support and HBEs performance: the higher the level of local support, the higher the indicators of economic growth and social equity, and the lower the indicators of negative externalities of the activity. Consequently, supportive government intervention is advocated as the primary policy recommendation of this paper.