Self-employment as a socio-economic phenomenon: impact on sustainability of regional development

One of the most important forms of labor is self-employment. The project launched in Russia to introduce a tax on professional activities stimulated the processes of self-employment legalization and it sets a number of research tasks, including the identification of the emerging consequences of the development of self- employment processes for the economy. This article sets the following goal: on the basis of the study of the essence of self-employment as an economic phenomenon, the goal of research consists in the identification of trends in the development of this process in the southern regions of Russia and determines the directions for effectiveness growth of their impact on the sustainability of regional development. The objects of the study were the regions of the Southern Federal District. The study determined that self-employment can act as a consequence of economic problems and as a tool for economic development. The authors identified trends in the development of self-employment in Russia and in the regions of the Southern Federal District, revealed the accelerators of this process, and they are: professional training for entrepreneurial activity; growth of the level of financial literacy of the population; availability of loans for start-ups with transparent conditions for their provision; policy supporting labor migrants in their business in their native cities; provision of self-employed with quality services and servicing, including digital ones. Suggestions for the development of self-employment processes were made and they allow increasing regional sustainability when developing social capital. It is mentioned that today it is fundamentally important for the state to give citizens with such a tax status basic social guarantees, while maintaining favorable conditions for the development of platform employment, since the self-employed are less protected in terms of social guarantees and rights.