New Trends in Employment Policy: Social Entrepreneurship

The paper deals with social entrepreneurship - one of the labour marker segments that focuses on employing specific groups. According to the "Czech social business" register, in the Czech Republic there are around 210 social enterprises. Social enterprise is unique as it based on the public and private sector partnership and at least 40% of its employees come from specific groups (excluded persons). In the Czech Republic there has been no comprehensive study dedicated to social enterprises. The objective of this paper is to assess the status of social enterprises in the Czech Republic and introduce elements of social entrepreneurship. The main data on the number of social enterprises is taken from the social business register. To assess the social enterprise status, we chose the questionnaire survey method. The businesses were selected as successful applicants for EU subsidies in the Social Economy call for tender. The questionnaire survey showed that the influence of external funds was almost definite and many of the entrepreneurs would not start up the social enterprises without external financing (70% of the entrepreneurs would not start up the business without assistance). It is obvious that there is a missing government concept of social entrepreneurship steering the formation and development of social enterprises in the longer term.