Having an uncertain income is one of the things that people find frightening about going into business for themselves. Unlike a salary earned from working for someone else, future business profits are hard to predict. And people like to be able to forecast what they will earn in coming years.
While the the unpredictability of business income is something that makes people everywhere apprehensive about business ownership, how big this fear is varies a great deal across countries. A random survey of the population of 36 countries undertaken in 2009 indicated that only 19 percent of the population in South Korea but 59 percent in Lithuania saw an uncertain income as one of the two scariest aspects of starting a company (see below).
That’s nearly three times as many Lithuanians as Koreans consider the unpredictability of business earnings to be one of their greatest fears about entrepreneurship indicates that people from some countries are better able to deal with this fundamental difference between working for oneself and working for someone else.
As you might expect, Americans were not as likely to be apprehensive about the uncertainty of business income as people from other nations. The U.S. was tied with the Netherlands and Iceland for the seventh lowest percentage of the population identifying uncertain income as one of their two greatest fears about business formation across the 36 nations where the survey took place.
Fear of an uncertain income is a top apprehension about going into business for oneself.
