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The debate on the effects of import competition on sectoral composition of employment remains unsettled. Using the case of the Indian manufacturing sector and exploiting plausibly exogenous variation from Chinese imports, we provide the first causal evidence that higher import competition increases the share of the formal sector employment. We nd an increase in the level of formal sector employment, driven by firms in the top 50% of the productivity distribution, and in contrast, a fall in the informal sector employment. This labor reallocation from informal to formal enterprises is enabled by the usage of contract workers, who do not carry stringent ring costs and are usually not covered by trade unions. Our estimates imply that Chinese import competition led to an increase in the share of formal sector employment by 3.9 percentage points between 2000-2001 and 2005-2006, which suggests an increase in aggregate labor productivity by 3.28%. Our results are robust to an instrumental variables estimation, and controlling for a host of other potential trade channels and worker characteristics.

This paper investigates the effects of trade liberalisation induced labour demand shocks on informal employment in China. We employ a local labour market approach to construct a regional measure of exposure to import tariffs by exploiting initial differences in industrial composition across prefectural cities and then link it with the employment status of individuals. Using three waves of household survey data between 1995 and 2007, our results show that workers from regions that experienced a larger tariff cut were more likely to be employed informally. Further results based on firm-level data reveal a consistent pattern; tariff reductions increased the share of informal workers within firms. Such effects are more salient among smaller and less productive firms. Our findings suggest an important margin of labour market adjustment in response to trade shocks in developing countries, i.e. employment adjustment along the formal-informal dimension.

French Abstract: L’objectif de cet article vise a decrire les possibilites de developper un climat d’affaires pour les tres petites entreprises en mettant les passerelles d’accompagnement pour etre dans le formel, la majorite de cette categorie d’entreprise se trouve dans le secteur informel. Cette etude permet aux autorites de de s’interroger sur leur manquement au developpement de ce secteur. Le concept de « secteur informel » fut utilise pour la premiere fois dans une etude sur le Kenya realisee en 1972 pour le Programme mondial de l'emploi du BIT. Ce secteur constitue une part tres importante pour les pays sub saharienne, il echappe plus ou moins a la legalite. English Abstract: The objective of this article aims to describe the possibilities of developing a business climate for very small businesses by providing support to be in the formal sector, the majority of this category of business is in the informal sector. This study allows the authorities to question their failure to develop this sector. The concept of the “informal sector” was first used in a 1972 study on Kenya for the ILO's World Employment Program. This sector constitutes a very important part for sub-Saharan countries, it more or less escapes legality.

On 19th April 2021, the Western Balkan Network Tackling Undeclared Work held an online seminar that brought together representatives from enforcement authorities and social partners. The intention was to discuss and share understanding of the major challenges they face in pursuing greater cooperation and provide tips for other Western Balkan economies on how these challenges might be addressed. It was also an opportunity to explore the scope for greater cooperation and to share learning on the type of initiatives that social partners can pursue to protect legitimate businesses and workers by transforming undeclared work into declared work. Around 40 participants from the Ministries of Labour, Labour Inspectorates, Tax Authorities and social partners (representatives of trade unions and employers’ associations) across the Western Balkans exchanged views and contributed to peer learning by answering the key discussion topics: identifying major challenges in developing greater cooperation; ways to improve the cooperation between social partners and authorities; and naming practical steps that could be undertaken to improve cooperation. The aim of this learning resource is to summarise the discussion at the seminar. To do so, section 2 reports the discussion on the scope for greater cooperation between enforcement authorities and social partners, section 3 reports the discussion on the types of initiatives in which social partners could become more involved and section 4 the next steps that can be taken.

Various studies found wage gaps between formal and informal sector workers even after controlling for a number of individual and firm level characteristics. It has also been shown that earnings differentials across these sectors are quite stable over the years. While there is limited amount of research considering the same issues focusing on Turkish labor market, the development of wage gap between formal and informal employment has not been examined. In our paper, we carry this analysis for Turkey and estimate the wage gap between formal and informal sector workers by utilizing the Household Labor Force Survey (LFS) for the period of 2005 and 2019. There are three main findings; first, decline in informal employment is not uniform and especially after 2012 there is a slight increase in the share of informal jobs at the lower end of wage distribution. Second, we demonstrate that returns to informality vary significantly across quantiles even after a matching technique through inverse probability treatment weights are considered. While at the upper end of the distribution, the penalty is extremely small and stable over the years, at the bottom end, the informal sector considerably reduces wages, and the effect becomes larger over time. The negative and increasing penalty is observable well before the refugee inflows. The last part of our analysis looks at the occupational composition within formal and informal sectors over time and points out that the rise of white collar low skilled service (WCLS) jobs among informal employment is mainly responsible for the increasing wage gap for the workers at the bottom end.

Developing countries are facing the Covid-19 epidemic with particular challenges, such as their economic and labor force composition. In this research I will extend the so-called SIR-macro model with demand and supply effects to study how the size of the informal sector impact the ability of these countries to respond to the epidemic. Lockdown policies are useful to control the health crisis but these are less effective in informal markets. As a result, infection and death rates will not decrease as expected, and since informal activities are not counted in the calculation of the GDP, this would exacerbate the size of the recession. Finally, in order to generate similar results to an economy with only formal markets, the economy with informal markets has to implement more severe containment policies.

Using a combination of rich administrative and household survey data, we document a series of new facts on earnings inequality and dynamics in a developing country with a large informal sector: Brazil. Since the mid-1990s, both inequality and volatility of earnings have declined significantly in Brazil's formal sector. Higher-order moments of the distribution of earnings innovations show similar cyclical movements in Brazil as in developed countries like the U.S. Earnings mobility is comparatively high, especially at the bottom of the distribution. Compared to the formal sector, earnings are more volatile in the informal sector. Workers who switch between sectors experience earnings innovations that have a positive mean and are positively skewed when moving to the formal sector but have a negative mean and are negatively skewed when moving to the informal sector. A secular shift of employment toward the less volatile formal sector since the early 2000s has contributed to a decline in the economy-wide volatility of earnings.

Pakistan currently faces its worse social and economic crises amidst COVID19 pandemic. The nationwide lockdown, desert locust attack, and rains have further exacerbated the economic crises, particularly raising food prices, unemployment, poverty and endangered food security of the public. This paper ascertain the ongoing pandemic, food crises, and concludes that the corona pandemic, combined with other factors such floods, locust attack and delayed decision making, caused a nation-wide food insecurity crises, particularly affecting the agricultural, and livestock sector followed by food supply chains. Similarly, the higher risk factors towards Food security are increased retail prices of food items, combined with reduced incomes, meaning that more and more households have to cut down on the quantity and quality of their food consumption. It is believed that this situation would otherwise be averted, if proper and timely interventions were taken. On the recommendations side, priority should be given to address underlying food security crises, by diversifying agricultural sector, subsidizing food items, tackling viral spread by strengthening health system, improve food and price surveillance, reduce rural poverty, in particular by provision of more and decent jobs in the rural economy, extending social protection to all, facilitating and promoting the formalization of the informal economy, labor rights, leverage tech and private-public partnership to curtail Food insecurity amidst COVID-19 crises.

This article investigated the impact of Igbo Apprenticeship System (IAS) on informal sector businesses in Nigeria. IAS is an innovative indigenous informal sector financing approach among the Igbo people in Nigeria. The study conceptualized the capital sharing model of IAS in comparison with venture capital and modern incubation system. Using a household survey data collected from about 400 informal sector businesses randomly selected from Onitsha (Anambra state) and Aba (Abia states) in South-Eastern Nigeria, the study examined the effect of capital sharing model on small firm growth in Nigeria. The estimation technique was based on ordinary least square (OLS) method while the Probit regression was used as a robust check on the OLS estimates. Findings revealed that the businesses of apprentice-graduates, i.e. those who underwent IAS grew significantly in any of the three measures of growth used; unlike the businesses whose owners did not undergo IAS. Therefore, this study provided an empirical validation to the use of the capital sharing model of the Igbo Apprenticeship System as an innovative informal sector financing model in Nigeria. The study thus recommends a policy framework that supports this innovative informal sector financing in Nigeria. Also, the venture capital and modern incubation system can be extended to incorporate features of the capital sharing model of IAS. This would however require strengthening the informal sector business environment.

Collecting, sharing and analysing data can improve enforcement authority performance not only in detecting undeclared work but also preventing non-compliance. The aim of this toolkit is to support enforcement authorities in the Western Balkans to improve their knowledge and awareness of how to develop efficient databases to detect, prevent and predict undeclared work. The objectives of this toolkit are (i) to discuss the challenges faced around data collection, sharing and analysis and (ii) to offer tips on how data collection, sharing and analysis could be improved, not least by reporting good practices.

From the era of legendary groundnut pyramids in the 1910s to FinTech development in the 2010s, the Nigerian people have continually proven that they are the nation’s greatest resources. Socially and economically, Nigerians have seen in the recent decades, less reasons to depend on the government and in consequence, have made MSMEs in the informal sector the engine of the Africa’s biggest economy. Admittedly, the government has realized this role and have recently put in place fiscal policies to aid the growth of this sector by reducing taxes, curbing multiplicity of taxes and the introducing monetary empowerment schemes. However, the focus of the government towards their obligation of providing the core of human capital development – education and health – has remained below average. This reality has caused decades-long strain on the most viable sector of our economy and has only seemed to get worse. This paper thus analyses, with both mathematical and doctrinal methods, the impact of education and health on the working capacity of a populace and finds that they are the direct human factors for economic growth and productivity of a nation. This paper thereafter recommends points for policy implementation suited for the Nigerian reality.

This paper is the first to use bookwork, a form of spreadable media, to explore and reflect upon the impact of informal sector tourism on indigenous Namibian craft culture. We seek to convey the manner in which “outsiders” (such as tourists) can permanently influence authentic craft processes by observing and purchasing low cost, easily mass-produced, inauthentic brightly colored objects and generating an artistic installation titled Grey Market Tourism to be used as the centerpiece of an academic discussion in this paper on the outsider’s view of the encroachment on authentic Namibian craft and to the broader society in a public art exhibition. Through the use of bookwork as creative output, we raise questions about tourism, the commodification of art, and the meaning of authenticity in craft culture. We also issue a "call to action" regarding greater integration of art practices in business literature through interdisciplinary collaboration and broader recognition of artistic expressions, such as bookwork, as research output.

The paper takes a critical look at the state intervention policy in the development of the informal sector in Nigeria with particular reference to National Directorate of Employment (NDE). This paper is of the opinion that although the state intervention policy in the development of the informal sector is well thought-out, but the implementation of such intervention policies is bedevilled by corruption, exploitation and squander mania as exemplified by the behaviour of the actors of Nigeria State. Thus, the paper contends that the anti-developmental posture of the actors of Nigeria state has ostensibly rendered superfluous the development value of the informal sector in Nigeria, thereby making the informal sector incapable of contributing enormously to the development of Nigeria. The paper recommended inter alia that the Nigerian state should initiate and implement development paradigms that are people and result oriented.

As Indian economy was crippling due to its poverty ratio and lack of education in the society and its increasing unemployment rate, the coronavirus was making its way in the Indian roads. The first case in India of COVID-19 patient was reported on 30th Jan 2020 and that person had travel from Wuhan, China, Where rest of world already reported thousands of cases. It was just the starting of a huge setback which is totally unpredicted by anyone. The increasing growth rate of coronavirus patients in China and Europe leads to the death of number of people as there was no proper vaccine or first aid developed for this virus yet so the governments left with only option to impose the lockdown for unthinkable period of time in the respective countries, thus to take precaution against the virus the people were told by the leaders to quarantine themselves and follow social distancing nouns and the laws made by the government. On 24 March 2020 Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced 21 days nationwide lockdown thus making people stay at home people were not allowed to go out of houses without any emergency (medical needs, groceries etc.) and the economic impact of this lockdown is much more severe on migrant workforce, These workers constituting the informal sector, total to a staggering 139 million and are about 93% of the workforce. According to a survey about 50% of these people had ration for less than a day and a study by Stranded Workers Action Network stated that 89% of stranded workers had not being paid wages by their employer during the first 21days of lockdown thus many of them have to move back to their towns. And the situation were made much worse for them as buses, trains and taxis were out of services due to lockdown, many of them have to walked, cycled hundreds of kilometers with all their stuff in hand with their entire family

We analyze for the first time the welfare effects of unemployment benefits (UBs) in a context of high informality, exploiting matched administrative and survey data with individual-level information on UB receipt, formal and informal employment, wages and consumption. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that dismissal from a formal job causes a large drop in consumption, which is between three to six times larger than estimates for developed economies. This is generated by a permanent shift of UB recipients towards informal employment, where they earn substantially lower wages. We then exploit a kink in benefits and show that more generous UBs delay program exit through a substitution of formal with informal employment. However, the disincentive effects are small and short-lived. Because of the high insurance value and the low efficiency costs, welfare effects from increasing UBs are positive for a range of values of the coefficient of relative risk aversion.

Townships continue to be the epitome of informal sector economics that often goes unnoticed nor understood. One should be mindful that there is a causation for the above-mentioned issue resulting to townships constantly dealing with the lack of infrastructural development and basic service delivery which results to township businesses to not develop to their full economic potential. Every individual who stays in a township can testify to the lack of opportunities; the movement of the small businesses from townships to urban areas has grown disregarded. To this end, the underdeveloped small businesses which remain in township are often strained.

Estimation of the activities of the informal sector in an economy poses a serious problem for obtaining a correct estimate of GDP. This happens to be so because of the fact that informal sector activities are not registered. The literature has tried to solve the problem of estimation of the informal sector using the method of latent variables. The standard approach is generally aims to estimate for a single point. The present paper aims to model the statistical estimation of informal sector of many countries in a common framework and the evolution of the informal sector over time. Thus the adopted approach in this paper is panel estimation for a group of 22 countries, both from the developed and developing world. The study contributes in the literature by way of developing statistical model ‘Panel Dynamic Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes’ model to account for the variations in the contribution of informal sector. Using the statistical model the paper presents modified estimates of the informal sector of the group of countries over a period ranging from 1990 through 2018. Our estimates of the informal sector are found to be generally higher, sometimes more than 10% for the developing country group while the estimates for the developed countries show little variability.

This paper studies the effect of an increase in import competition on informality along two margins. It considers the extensive margin, where workers are hired by unregistered employers, and the intensive margin, where even though jobs are carried out by registered firms, employees are off the books. Peru’s relentless informal employment and its unprecedented trade-driven growth provides an ideal case study. Using a rich household survey, this study finds that exposure to trade impacts on informality through two competing and contrasting mechanisms. On the one hand, extensive-informal employment declines as unregistered employers shrink or exit due to their low productivity. On the other hand, intensive-informal employment rises as registered employers reduce costs by hiring informal workers. Furthermore, results suggest that the intensive margin drives the overall effect. Hence, trade liberalization increases informality.

The outbreak of the global pandemic in late 2019 in China Huwan China was accompanied by a number of impacts both on the heath, economic and political sector in the entire world. This study unearthed the impacts of COVID-19 on the informal sector within Hwange Urban during the COVID-19 era. The study revealed that COVID-19 has greatly affected the informal sector as it affected their source of incomes as their operations was affected and banned during the lockdown. Also during the lockdown era there was high food insecurities caused by the COVID-19 because people where no longer able to sell their products. High levels of violence, corruption and increased competition as people where now engaging in illegal trading. In this regard, people in the informal sector implemented a number of coping strategies in order to respond these challenges, illegally conducting business, virtual selling and buying.

Tax collection is vital to maintain fiscal sustainability. According to a World Bank report, developing economies average 15% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in tax collections which is lower than that in advanced economies i.e. 40%. This inability of the developing economies recognizes weak legislation, infrastructure and management of country resources. To address this loophole some developing states have managed to introduce and implement reforms in their tax sector. In the context of Pakistan, the real challenge lies in bridging the gap between the key stakeholders in national economy i.e. policy makers, state institutions and its public. Additionally, the paper aims to address the discrepancies between the formal and informal economy. The case study approach can serve as a guide for the tax sector of Pakistan aiming to revamp its tax system.

For the past seventy years, separate international regimes have governed the economic lives of refugees and labor migrants. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) oversees all aspects of refugee resettlement, including livelihoods, while the International Labor Organization (ILO) is charged with addressing the labor rights of migrants. This division has become increasingly problematic as international actors have sought to move refugees into employment arenas from which they have been largely excluded since the end of WWII. This article uses a case study of the 2016 EU-Jordan Compact to illustrate the risks inherent in positioning refugees as workers in the absence of a commitment to a rights-based approach. The Compact was negotiated between the European Commission, the World Bank, and the Government of Jordan, in consultation with the UNHCR; the ILO played no role in crafting the agreement. It sought to place 150,000 Syrians in Jordanian garment export manufacturing jobs, replacing an existing migrant workforce in an industry notorious for low pay and poor conditions. This effort quickly foundered. Instead, large numbers of Syrian refugees have been channeled into informal employment in construction and agriculture in Jordan, where they and migrant co-workers face pervasive violations of labor standards. Without decent work as a central goal, the Compact ultimately concentrated some of the world’s most vulnerable workers in some of its least desirable jobs. To protect refugees and others alongside whom they labor, the article argues, refugee employment initiatives must be accompanied by attention to decent work from the outset. At the international level, this should include a critical role for the ILO, in recognition of its extensive expertise with the establishment and enforcement of labor standards for all workers.

Among all categories of the informal sector, the protection of domestic workers forms one of the biggest challenges to labor laws. The inherent subjugation involved in the work, along with a typical nature of the work of domestic workers, makes them more vulnerable than other workers in the economy. The difficulties are associated with the work being performed within the household, primarily for non-commercial purposes. The household, primarily for non-commercial purposes. The work space, being a private space, makes regulation and implementation difficult. The lack of effective regulation and the extremely informal nature of the service render domestic workers without any basic protection. In the event of any economic uncertainty, they are left at the mercy of their employers. In the event of any economic uncertainty, they are left at the mercy of their employers. It is, therefore, essential to develop a system of social security that can afford adequate protection to domestic workers, with minimal state involvement in the affairs of the family. This paper seeks to provide suggestions for such a scheme, which is suited to the peculiar characteristics of domestic workers in India. It recognizes that scattered and isolated schemes are sufficient to afford adequate protection to workers. The social security model suggested is a decentralized model where social security is integrated with other important concerns such as minimum wages, skill development, and increasing awareness and bargaining power of domestic workers. These suggestions have been made after undertaking an analysis of existing legal provisions for domestic workers in India and the best practices from various jurisdictions that have seen relative success in providing social security to domestic workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted all spheres of life including the financial sector. In developing economies, the high number of people and businesses that fall under the informal sector is something that continues to receive policy attention. The actors within the informal sector are mostly those within the rural or urban poor and the pro-poor population. Mobile money services, which are digitised technologies that allow mobile phone users to access financial services have been improving the state of financial inclusion. This study explores the current state of mobile money usage in Ghana, discussing the issues within the context of COVID-19. The study further provides a futuristic analysis of the emerging developments on the use of mobile money as a tool for enhancing financial inclusion. Essentially, these future projections are provided on the critical issues that need to be considered in a post-COVID-19 context. Although the analysis dwells heavily on Ghana, the issues raised can be applied to the context of other developing economies with similar informal sectors and pro-poor populations.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework on the impact of informal employment in the lives of Nepalese women, their rights, and safety. In this paper, we will be talking about the involvement of women in major forms of informal employment as in 'unprotected employment' and not 'employment in the informal sector.’ The predominant sectors like the film industry, nightclubs, restaurants, and bars where female workers are more susceptible to ill-treatment, will be analyzed in this paper. The introduced legal framework, existing conditions, and proposes the empirical solutions will be out to emphasize security for the female win every workplace. The threats and insecurities females belonging to nightclubs will be expressed and the distinction between 'work security and 'social security is clarified in this paper to grab the attention of policymakers in upbringing a positive environment for females to feel secure.

We compare decisions by female and male judges in child support trials where a judge decides on the father's income allocation to children. We investigate two types of cases: 1) when fathers have a formal job, their income is known to judges, and awards are set as a fraction of it, and 2) when fathers work in the informal sector, their income is unknown to judges, and awards are given as a fixed amount of money. By exploiting random assignment of cases to judges, we find that female judges set lower awards in both cases in comparison to male judges. However, the gender gap under incomplete information is around two thirds the size of that under complete information. In exploring mechanisms underlying this difference, we propose a simple framework to elicit judges' beliefs about the unknown income in such cases by using their judicial behaviour in cases where income is known. We find that female judges estimate that the unknown income is higher, but still award lower amounts of child support than male judges do. Thus, gender differences act as a countervailing force and explain the attenuation of judges' gender differences in decisions under incomplete information.

We study the degree of synchronization between formal- and informal-economy business cycles. Using a comprehensive database of informal activity that covers a wide range of informality measures from almost 160 countries over the 1990-2018 period, we report two major results. First, fluctuations in informal-sector output are strongly positively correlated with those in formal-sector output. In contrast, fluctuations in informal employment are largely uncorrelated with those in formal-sector output. Second, movements in the formal economy tend to spillover to the informal economy. Using a novel set of instrumental variables, we show that fluctuations in formal-sector output "cause" movements in informal-sector output.

This study attempt to examine the effect of the COVID-19 on women participation in the labor market. We have used the ILO and World bank data to determine how the recession affect women employment in a different region? And how current pandemic (COVID-19) affect women employment? The result shows that lower-middle-income, middle income and upper-middle-income group effect from any upcoming recession. Moreover, the labour market in the lower-income countries is already severe, and the current pandemic could further widen the gender gap. Among all women are associated with informal employment in any sector, tourism, food, and small enterprise would be suffered the most.

Controversial constitutional and institutional reforms voted in May in parliament opened the way for President Gnassingbe to stand for a fourth and fifth term (2020 and 2030) because the law does not apply retroactively. The first local elections since more than 30 years resulted in the victory of the ruling party. Grand expectations of the opposition which had hoped for a fundamental change at least at the grassroots were again dashed. The human rights situation sharply deteriorated due to growing political and social tensions related to the prospects of the head of state running for a fourth term. Islamist terrorist violence spread from Mali to the northern frontier region of Togo. The autonomous deep-water port of Lome developed as a growth pole and hub for the sub-region. China became the major partner beside the established partners the EU, France and Germany. The informal sector still dominated the economy. Economic freedom remained with the overall status 'mostly unfree'.

This paper estimates the job and wage losses of workers, using the lens of informality, due to lockdown measures undertaken by the Government of India to tackle the spread of COVID-19. It focuses on the first two lockdowns when containment measures in India were most stringent in the world. We estimate that 104 million and 69.4 million informally employed workers were at risk of job loss in Lockdown 1.0 and Lockdown 2.0 respectively. Informal workers lost more wages, 22.6 percent, than formal workers, 3.6 percent. Workers informally employed in unorganised sector suffered a wage loss, amounting to Rs. 635.53 billion, which is almost equivalent to annual union budget allotted for employment guarantee scheme MGNERGA in 2020-2021. The prevalence of informal labour markets calls for a larger change in the social protection framework to deal with the uncertain economic situation like the one we are facing today.

On 30th September 2020, the Western Balkan Network tackling undeclared work held an online meeting to discuss a holistic integrated strategic approach towards undeclared work. This learning resource documents for each component of this holistic integrated strategic approach: (i) the challenges that can be experienced; (ii) the ways forward, and (iii) examples of good practice potentially transferable to other economies both from the EU and Western Balkans.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic impacted with multidimensional crisis has disrupted the functioning of the society, devastated global economy and has debilitated development. The appalling implications varied from country to country depending on their economy, health infrastructure, and socio-political factors. This in turn has also reflected on their responses to the pandemic where a few have fared well and some have catastrophically failed. The challenges are projected to be much severe for the emerging economies with large populations, inadequate health infrastructure, economic instability and inequalities. International bodies such as World Bank, ILO and UN have predicted the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic for the emerging economies in terms of poverty, increasing unemployment, gender inequality and issues affecting the vulnerable groups. This scenario makes it inevitable to analyze the responses of those countries that have successfully managed the challenges and build effective strategies for the future based on the lessons learnt. This symposium is a follow-up of the International Virtual Symposium (IVS) on Pandemics, Climate Change and Growing Inequality: Emerging Paradigm Shift in Helping Professions held on 28.08.2020 in which seven resource persons across the globe enriched hundreds of scholars, faculty members and practitioners; and the National Virtual Symposium II (NVS-II) on Informality, New Forms of Work, Labour Concerns of the Pandemic: Evolving Strategies for Helping Professions organized on 12.09.2020 in which four resource persons from premier institutions of the country enlightened the participants from 33 universities and 43 colleges on the plight of the informal sector. The report has portrayed the keynote address of the five eminent academicians who are teaching at prestigious Institutions across the cities in India. They have shared their perspectives on the impacts of COVID-19 on society, economy, development and the challenges on the emerging economies. The report also encloses the objectives, thrust areas of research and expected outcome from the National Virtual Symposium that aims to call for papers for an edited book proposal on Society, Economy and Development During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons for Emerging Economies, which is an attempt to amalgamate knowledge from diverse disciplines and to subsequently develop models and strategies to respond effectively to current challenges and future pandemics.

Can consumption taxes reduce inequality in developing countries? We combine household expenditure data from 31 countries with theory to shed new light on the redistributive potential and optimal design of consumption taxes. We use the type of store in which purchases occur to proxy for informal (untaxed) consumption. This enables us to characterize the informality Engel curve: we find that the budget share spent in the informal sector steeply declines with income, in all countries. The informal sector thus makes consumption taxes progressive: households in the richest quintile face an effective tax rate that is twice that of the poorest quintile. We extend the standard optimal commodity tax model to allow for informal consumption and calibrate it to the data to study the effects of different tax policies on inequality. Contrary to consensus, we show that consumption taxes are redistributive, lowering inequality by as much as personal income taxes. Once informality is taken into account, commonly used redistributive policies, such as reduced tax rates on necessities, have a limited impact on inequality. In particular, subsidizing food cannot be justified on equity or efficiency grounds in several poor countries. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Today, it is statistically evident and, to a large extent, factually verified, that India’s growth trajectory has followed the path of jobless growth. Data provided by the NSSO indicates a falling trend in employment from 2.8% in 2004-05 to a mere 0.5% in 2011-12. Given the sector wise distribution of the labor force, where the share of primary sector is 48.9%, the secondary sector is 23.4% and tertiary sector at 26.8%, 90% of this labor force comes under the informal sector. Past trends point to the fact that despite rigid labor laws in our country, regimes of employment have adapted and converted their ways towards incorporating more and more workers in the informal as opposed to the formal sector, even within the organized sector. In light of this understanding, this paper aims at assessing the rigid labor laws in the Indian economy and their impact on employment opportunities across the country in various sectors. The paper concludes that the prevailing labor laws have prevented the economy from specializing in labor intensive products in which the country has a comparative advantage and thus made the growth process less inclusive. The paper further discusses and attempts to refute the arguments and examples given by sceptics of rigid labour laws. The paper concludes with recommendations of reform strategies that can be advocated to improve and relax certain rigid laws such as Industrial Disputes Act 1947, Factories Act, 1948 and Trade Unions Act 1926.

The International Labor Organization (ILO)’s agenda for migrant domestic workers promotes formal contracts and special migration programs while almost exclusively associates informality with the harms of human trafficking. This article studies a group of informal Filipina domestic workers in China who are working outside formality yet earning the highest wages and the top-tier working conditions in Asia. Typical labor migration programs (e.g., Singapore) tie the worker’s immigration status to a labor contract and rigidly enforce the contract with immigration law measures. In comparison, the rather uncertain connection between workplace strategies and immigration law enforcement in the informal Chinese market ironically enables workers to renegotiate their jobs after arrival, which significantly enhances their bargaining power inside and outside the workplace household. This case study rebuts the international labor law’s tendency to use formality as a marker for good jobs. Rather, it argues for evaluating the distributional consequences of the legal and nonlegal rules through the lens of workers’ bargaining power. Following this framework, it proposes workers’ access to post-arrival renegotiations as the rule to empower migrant domestic workers.

Several new dualistic models have re-examined the causes of the informal economy and have made testable predictions about the long-lasting role of inequality. We test these predictions using historical indicators of inequality, dating back to the 1700s, and data on the informal economy across 138 countries over the 1991–2015 period. We find that past levels of inequality are the most salient factors explaining the size of the informal economy, while improving credit access, reducing tax burden and business costs play a minor role. These results are robust to using alternative inequality measures from various years during the 1700–1992 period, using instrumental variables, and four alternative measurements of the informal economy. Moreover, there is no evidence that the informal economy is converging to the same steady state. Instead, there is convincing evidence of club convergence. Countries with the highest levels of initial inequality are diverging from those that started with lower levels of inequality and those who have made significant redistribution. Results suggest the importance of early conditions in determining the persistence of the dual economy with important policy implications.

This report documents how policy makers in EU Member States and enforcement authorities can undertake ‘horizon scanning’ to identify trends in undeclared work. On the one hand, an early warning system is developed for policy-makers in EU Member States. This identifies the macro-level changes that are (1) threats and risks to the growth of each type of undeclared work, and (2) strengths and opportunities for reducing each type of undeclared work. On the other hand, the types of assessment of trends in undeclared work that Member State enforcement authorities can undertake are identified, followed by a review of the early interventions that enforcement authorities have taken in response to specific negative signals, to facilitate mutual learning across Member States.

In recent reports of the European Platform tackling undeclared work, it has been recognised that bogus self-employment is not solely or even largely a product of the advent of the collaborative economy, and that undeclared work in the collaborative economy is not solely or even principally composed of bogus self-employment1. Reflecting these advances in understanding, this report is not simply about bogus self-employment in the collaborative economy. Instead, it evaluates separately firstly, the prevalence of undeclared work in the collaborative economy and secondly, bogus self-employment, using the currently available datasets, and following this, examines how Member States are currently tackling these forms of work, and considers what further initiatives could be undertaken. The intention is to enable enforcement authorities to engage in mutual learning around policy solutions, as well as to identify areas of activity where collective action at EU or EU regional level might be a more appropriate way forward.

Many developing countries are considering insurance as a means of pursuing universal health coverage. A key challenge to confront is how to achieve high levels of health insurance enrolment. For voluntary schemes, this entails mass awareness raising and promotional activity, though as schemes move to compulsory enrolment, monitoring and enforcement is required. This paper focuses on Ethiopia, which is has made state health insurance for the informal sector a central pillar of its universal health coverage strategy. The paper shows that high enrolment requires particular forms of state capacity, captured here by Michael Mann’s concept of state ‘infrastructural power’. The paper draws on detailed case studies of health insurance implementation in the Tigray and Oromiya regions of Ethiopia to illustrate variation in state infrastructural power and the implications for the promotion of health insurance. The findings suggest that the potential of state health insurance as a means of promoting health access for a broad section of the population may be limited to the minority of countries or regions within countries exhibiting high levels of infrastructural power.

This study provides multi-disciplinary assessment of the coronavirus pandemic transmission in Nigeria, magnitude of COVID-19 confirmed cases, recovery, deaths, and inventory of infected person with recovery lags. It applied the statistical outcomes in predicting spilling over to subsequent periods. It identifies economic sectors worst hit by COVID-19 triggered recession, simulate the estimates of potential fiscal and other macroeconomic impact of the pandemic in the country in short run alongside synthesis of restoration and sustainability strategies. Secondary data relating to coronavirus infection cases, spreads, recoveries and fatalities were assessed, using the susceptible-infected-recovered” (SIR) model in absence of mass testing and probable cessation from health crisis management. It identified economic sectors/activities being devastated by COVID-19 induced recession, provides interim estimates adverse impact based on economic peak and down-turn cycle method. The study also measured the magnitude of macroeconomic shocks in Nigeria’s economy using a standard global computable general equilibrium model and exploration of sustainability strategies based on synthesis of extant reports were employed. These data-sets were obtained from the Nigerian sources and partly from global sources. Furthermore, it utilized trend analysis derived from on empirical data of extant daily confirmed cases, discharges and hospitalized person together with tentative projection of additional confirmed cases as from July–September, 2020. Results revealed that confirmed cases in Nigeria will increase steadily from 25694 (in June) to around 74825 by the end September and expected to reach 121000 by end of year 2020. This suggests that the pandemic is likely to persist up to the second quarter of 2021. Education, transport (aviation), hospitality, tourism and sports businesses; trade (informal sector) in the services sector; petroleum exploration in mining sub-sector are most severely contracting activities industries in the economy. Given the prevailing intensity of recession, the result indicates that a reduction of about 5-to-7% in GDP will be recorded in 2020. Result of variance analysis of fiscal budget estimates indicates adverse increase of -2% in overall fiscal deficit balances during the periods, which may aggravate debt burden with decline of about -5.7 percent and up to -7 percent in nominal GDP. Health, education, agriculture, petroleum exploration; petroleum refining and petrochemical industries, manufacturing (particularly pharmaceuticals), energy and power generation should be given priority in the sustainability programme.

We currently know very little about the taxation of professionals in Africa– scholarly work on this group of taxpayers is scant. The little research that does exist is located within the literature on the taxation of the 'hard-to-tax', a term in tax evasion literature that refers to farmers, small and medium-sized enterprises, and professionals. However, scholarly discourse on the hard-to-tax in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in Africa, has focused primarily on farmers and small and medium-sized enterprises. Professionals are rarely critically considered, despite the acknowledgement in the literature that, considering their potential earnings, the absolute amount involved in evasion by professionals in low- and middle-income countries is probably higher than farmers and small and medium-sized enterprises. This paper begins from the premise that it is sensible to begin to focus more seriously on self-employed professionals in the policy and administrative efforts aimed at increasing tax collection from the informal sector in Africa. Proceeding on that premise, the author provides three lessons that we can learn from a Kenyan case study on taxing self-employed professionals in Africa.

This paper highlights the disaster costs which exist in the form of raids by authorities on informal service firms periodically. A disaster raid can cause irrefutable damage to household owners with monetary losses from loss of goods and eviction from the site location that makes it impossible for the owner to come back again. We develop a self-choice model where the owner is driven by his professionalism, asset holding, tax rates, and expected disaster costs. The owner’s choices include the option to remain unemployed, continue as owner or convert himself into a formal owner. Using the world banks’ micro enterprise survey data of over 1548 firms, we conduct tests of hypotheses. We find the owner’s self-drive and efficiency parameter to convert to formality is explained by his professional skill, and his and ownership status. We refute the significance of disaster costs which is outweighed by the owner’s professionalism.

We live in an age where digital platforms have the power to shape and channel our social and economic choices. The advent of technology and growth of digital platforms has created avenues for sharing outside trusted circles and brought opportunities for the establishment of entirely new kind of marketplaces. This business activity is what the World Economic Forum describes as the shift from ‘sharing’ to the ‘sharing economy’ (WEF, 2017). In the Indian context, ever since their introduction to the digital and physical marketplace, within a matter of a few years, sharing economy platforms like Uber, OLA, Urban Company, Swiggy, Zomato, WeWork and Airbnb have become household names in urban India. The sharing economy – unclassified capitalism, though a truant complier of regulations, has indispensable implications for the urban informal sector. The sharing economy has been on a steady thrive since its inception – majorly due to its ingenious utilisation of otherwise dormant private assets as a stream of services. While it may not be large enough to obliterate the informal sector, the sharing economy does improve the reputation of part-time work and thereby its wages – reflecting the high opportunity cost for unorganised sector workers in their enhanced bargaining power. Sharing organises informality by standardising output and enabling data collection in the informal economy. Furthermore, it collaterally consolidates the given sector – both vertically and horizontally – enabling better management of its activities. The sharing economy has thus earned the distinction of democratising employment amplified by spillover effects on other markets. Primitive sharing can be thought of as condominium and time-share arrangements that were the first to revolutionise the ability to scale and leverage assets. The precursors to the sharing economy existed in what appeared to be more local, even marginal, pockets, contributing to an assumption that these forms of doing business could not flourish on a large scale. The technological versions of the sharing economy challenge the assumption mightily creating the possibility of new types of sharing - a perfect visualisation of an Adam Smithian world ruled solely by market forces of demand and supply. By combining micro-entrepreneurship with democratic employment, it has undoubtedly overtaken traditional counterparts in obviating search cost and ensuring adequate supply. This seemingly perfect competition has the potential to redistribute resources in the economy and produce more equity in jobs and markets for a broader range of individuals typically marginalised from robust market participation. However, the confident unicorns of sharing economy seemed to have met unpredictable fortune with the onset of the COVID-19-19 pandemic. This contagious disease has the potential to decimate the consumer demand for these platforms unless necessary measures are taken and a roadmap is charted to mitigate its impact. This report critically analyses the Impact of COVID-19-19 on the Sharing Economy in India and outline the way forward for both platforms and gig workers.

The availability of jobs has been a great concern in developing countries like India, with exploding population, increasing urbanization rate and regional disparities in development. This results in migration from one to other cities, states in search of employment for improved livelihood. Migration has become essential, where population densities are high in relation to land. Frequent shortage of rainfall or suffer floods also forces people to move. Informality, circular migration, labour market and social discrimination, and segmentation go hand in hand. This puts these migrants vulnerable. The announcement of stringent lock-down at a notice of about four hours on 24, March 2020 in India in response to the Corona pandemic intensified the feeling of insecurity among the migrant labourers across various parts of the country. The loss in employment and incomes of the workers in the informal economy, some 93 percent of all workers, was almost complete in the first phase of the lockdown. The loss in employment and incomes immediately threatened their access to food and non-food essential items, rented accommodation and shelter in many places. The central government as well as many of the state governments failed to anticipate and understand the scale and nature of the problem faced by migrants. They chose to interpret and deal with the urgent issues as a law and order problem arising due to what it considered were planned spread of misinformation. With all forms of transport stopped completely at the initial stage of this lockdown, most of the immigrant labourers had no choice but to walk miles to their homes. This paper confines the study to internal labourers of India and uses secondary data sources and observations of the researchers during the lock down phase of COVID-19.

The size of the Russian informal economy has attenuated since 2014. However, there are a host of workers involved in economic exercises in the informal sector, and a handful of industries seems to rely on the informal economy too-much intensively. This manuscript takes a brief look at several issues going around the concept of the informal economy, then overviews the Russian informal economy and foresees its growth implications.

This paper examines the existing spatial inequalities in Residential Areas of Dhaka City on the basis of household resources and amenities. The empirical data has been collected through a detailed semi-structured questionnaire from 180 respondents in Dhanmondi and Mirpur Residential Area and Kallayanpur Slum area. The respondents were selected purposively from the megacity of Bangladesh namely, Dhaka. The results clearly indicate that there exist significant differences and variations of household resource and amenity indicators, particularly household and housing characteristics, sanitation facilities, water, electricity and gas supplies, etc. More specifically, the finding reveals that there is a huge gap in tenure systems, income-expenditure, occupational, education, and social status, utilities, and physical developments, are the prime issues for creating massive inequality in slum area from other residential areas. Furthermore, the slum dwellers are more deprived and neglected from all kinds of urban facilities though they play a significant role in the informal economy of urban areas as well as in the GDP of Bangladesh. Hence, the findings suggest that policymakers should take proper initiatives to address multi-dimensional issues of slum areas to ensure a sustainable environment among residential areas of Dhaka city.

On 17th November 2020, the Western Balkan Network tackling undeclared work held an online meeting to discuss preventative approaches towards undeclared work. The aim of this learning resource is to document for each preventative approach: (i) the challenges experienced in introducing them; (ii) the ways forward, and (iii) examples of good practice potentially transferable to other economies both from the EU and Western Balkans. To do so, section 2 introduces the four types of preventative policy measure, namely: supply-side incentives; demand-side incentives; education and awareness raising; and modernizing formal institutions. Section 3 provides a review of the challenges and tips for introducing supply-and demand-side incentives that transform undeclared work into declared work by making the conduct of declared work beneficial and easier for employers and workers, and target purchasers of undeclared goods and services with rewards for using declared goods and services. Section 4 then evaluates the implementation of education and awareness raising initiatives which change citizens, workers and employers’ norms, values and beliefs regarding the acceptability of undeclared work. Section 5 reviews the fourth and final type of preventative measure focused upon the modernization of formal institutions. Section 6 then discusses some good practice examples from Western Balkan economies and Section 7 draws conclusions and makes recommendations.

Based on findings from high-income countries, typically economists hypothesize that having more children unambiguously decreases the time mothers spend in the labor market. Few studies on lower-income countries, in which low household wealth, informal child care, and informal employment opportunities prevail, find mixed results. Using Mexican census data, I do not find evidence for negative employment effects of an instrument-induced increase in fertility. Mothers increasingly work in the informal sector when their family size increases. The presence of grandmothers and low wealth appear to be important. Econometric approaches that allow extrapolating from this complier-specific effect indicate that the response in informal employment is bounded to be non-negative for the entire sample.

I assemble new cross-country evidence showing that contrary to the standard view, the relationship between the size of the informal sector and tax rates is, at best, ambiguous. Law enforcement and informality also show no clear relation. Motivated by these findings, I augment a standard two-sector (formal and informal) small open economy model with endogenous law enforcement that depends on the size of the informal sector (measured by its assets) and government expenditure. I use a micro-dataset from Colombia to show that both taxes and law enforcement are necessary to match the the size of the informal sector observed in the data. In the absence of law enforcement, tax evasion incentives imply a counterfactually large informal sector. However law enforcement motivates households to reduce the supply of capital to the informal sector, decreasing the probability of detection. The dependence of the latter on government expenditure creates a non-linearity between tax rates and the size of the informal sector through a Laffer curve. The model implies that lowering tax rates would not necessarily reduce the size of the informal sector since there is a trade-off with law enforcement capability.

The Latin American economy has been suffering from low economic growth and is now hit particularly hard by the COVID-19-crisis. We find that Latin America has a relatively large informal sector of which only 6.7% is able to work from home and which has on average negative (median) savings. We describe the FinTech sector of Latin America, focusing on the largest sectors of alternative finance platforms, payments and remittances and enterprise finance management. Finally, we identify ways how FinTech companies in these segments can help the workers, entrepreneurs and the economies as a whole to deal with the crisis while incentivising the informal SMEs to digitalize and formalize. The paper concludes with suggestions for future avenues for further research.

By explicating the mechanisms through which International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs operate, this study investigates the effect of IMF intervention on the shadow economy. Using a sample of 141 countries from 1991 to 2014, we examine the impact of both IMF participation and conditionality on the informal economy. Our analyses address sources of endogeneity related to, first, the IMF participation decision and, second, the conditions included within the program. The empirical findings suggest that both IMF program participation and conditionality increase the size of the shadow economy. Disaggregating IMF conditions into structural and quantitative shows that only structural conditions are significantly related to a larger shadow economy both in the short- and long-term. Financial development can reduce the size of the shadow economy, yet it cannot reverse the detrimental effect of IMF conditions. Our initial results are found to be robust across alternative empirical specifications.