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Italy is characterised by a significant dualistic economy, which also includes an extensive underground sector. The aim of this study is to analyse the relationship between the quality of legislation and irregular employment in Italy. Our contribution consists of two components: the theoretical modelling of the impact of regulatory quality on the informal economy and the empirical validation of the predictions of the theoretical model using data from the Italian region between 2004 and 2019. The results confirm the theoretical and empirical arguments in favour of the need for laws to curb the informal sector. The regions with the highest institutional standards tend to have a lower percentage of irregular workers that fosters and encourages the legality of the labor market. Some robustness tests back up the main conclusions which show how important following rules is for strengthening the internal economy and for lowering the number of illegal workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether the Syrian refugee inflow to Jordan has displaced other immigrant workers in the Jordanian Labor Market. Using data from Jordan, before and after the Syrian refugee influx (in 2010 and 2016), we investigate whether male immigrants' labor market outcomes, compared to male Jordanian nationals, were affected by Syrian refugees. We control for the geographic sorting of refugees within Jordan using an instrumental variable approach. We find that male immigrants were more likely to be underemployed (i.e., work in the informal sector, work fewer hours, and earn lower monthly wages) in areas with high concentration of Syrian refugees. These findings suggest that the main competition that occurred in the Jordanian Labor Market, between 2010 and 2016, was not between refugees and male Jordanian nationals, but between refugees and male immigrants. These results suggest that studies examining the impact of refugees on the labor market should consider the effects on immigrants who are likely to be more vulnerable than natives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of economic growth patterns on employment structure, highlighting the effects of the main final demand components' variations. Brazil is an interesting case study, as it has experienced a combination of sustained economic growth, an improvement in income distribution, and a notable increase in job formalization in the 2004-2013 period. We explore how the Brazilian growth pattern contributed to the employment growth and changes in the occupational structure (informal and formal jobs, and wage-level) and provide original insights into the Brazilian labor market in the long 2000s. We find no signs of typical job polarization, as changes in job structure relate to reductions in wage inequality. We develop a structural decomposition analysis to measure the demand components' role in explaining the Brazilian labor market's transformations based on an effective demand input-output model. Drawing on an analysis of cumulative causation between income distribution, household consumption, and occupational structure, we find that induced consumption significantly impacted service and trade industries, increasing the low-wage jobs growth rate. Our analysis suggests that the combination of cumulative causation with government consumption and investment growth is crucial to explain distributive gains and the absence of job polarization in the Brazilian labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there are concerns whether economies are becoming farther from equality and competency. While this matters to every economy, it is more crucial for developing ones who already suffer from income inequalities and lack of competency. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses an administrative data from the Iran's Social Security Organization (ISSO) that provides insurance to workers entitled to the Labor Law of Iran. The data contain more than 7,000,000 workers. The authors assess heterogeneous impact of the first wave of the pandemic by firms' size and average payment. Findings: The authors' estimation results indicate that, following the initiation of the pandemic, the workers whose corresponding firms are smaller, overall, are more prone to the pandemic and are more likely to submit a request for unemployment benefits. However, the relation is neither homogeneous across sectors nor linear among micro-sized firms. Few sectors indicate a positive relationship between size and likelihood of request submission, including cultural activity, shoemaking and clothing sectors. Besides the size, the authors investigate whether pay grades could explain the probability of becoming unemployed after the pandemic. Results show that workers whose corresponding firms pay less are more likely to submit a request. This is robust within different sectors. Research limitations/implications: The ISSO dataset is not a panel, so the authors cannot employ methods of causal inferences. The authors' results should be seen as correlation; however, due to exogeneity and sharpness of the pandemic the result infers to some degree of causality. The data does not cover the informal sector, so the estimates are at lower boundary. Originality/value: Administrative data on unemployment benefits during COVID-19 show that the pandemic interferes with competition by forcing low-paid workers and small firms to exit the market. This is an alarm for the competition in every economy, specially developing ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: In the analysis of the relationship between the labour market and crime, the variable that comes from the labour market is generally the unemployment rate. However, there are labour market characteristics that are more significant than unemployment, such as labour informality, in the context of violent crime in low‐income and middle‐income countries. Purpose: This article aims to estimate the spatial and economic relationship between homicides and labour informality by neighbourhood in Cali, the city with the highest homicide rate currently and historically in Colombia. Methods and approach: Using administrative data and a unique survey of formal and informal labour market conditions, we estimate a Spatial Durbin Model to capture the spatial endogeneity of the relationship between homicides and the labour market in the city's neighbourhoods. Findings: The main results show evidence of the positive spatial and economic relationship between labour informality and homicides in the city's neighbourhoods. In addition, the bulk of this effect occurs in some hillside settlement neighbourhoods with characteristics associated with acute labour informality. Policy implications: We propose a social and economic development programme to improve the conditions of the informal labour market and therefore achieve a reduction in homicides in specific areas, such as city hot spots found in our spatial results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the everyday lived realities of Southeast Asian migrant workers who left the formal sector of the labour market and entered the informal agricultural sector before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Taiwan. Drawing on observations of migrants' daily lives and farm work and 19 in‐depth interviews, it delves into migrants' subjective experiences of vulnerability, paternalism, exploitation, and control at work due to a lack of legal protection and the illegality of their employment. Although the literature has identified a link between 'running away' from formal employment and seeking freedom, this research suggests a continuum between experiences of work in the formal and informal economic sectors. The paper sheds new light on mobility, work, illegality, and informality and how these have constantly shaped 'runaway' workers' subjective experiences of freedom and unfreedom during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Indian government initiated several skill development policies and different types of vocational education and training (VET). Yet the participation in skill education is low because of poor labour market outcomes. This paper aims to calculate returns to skill education to understand the type of training that will have better labour market outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper nationally representative data from the periodic labour force survey (PLFS), collected by the national sample survey office for 2017–2018, are used to estimate the returns to formal and non-formal VET obtained (after different levels of general education) with the help of Heckman's two-stage method. Findings: Nearly 8% of the working-age population has received some form of VET (mostly non-formal), generating poor returns. For the overall population, formal on-job training (OJT) and full-time VET influence wage positively and significantly. Full-time VET obtained after secondary and below levels of education generates positive returns, whereas part-time VET is profitable only to those without formal education. At the graduate level, technical education obtained along with VET is associated with better wages. Originality/value: In India where a considerable proportion of the workforce is employed in the informal sector, different types of skill training like full-time, part-time and OJT influence labour market outcomes. This finding has policy implication for countries with large informal sector and calls for further research in such countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By combining theories on informal work with data collected through interviews with 39 Syrian refugees, this article provides a comprehensive analysis of the various factors driving Syrians, both ordinary workers and employers, into the informal labour market in Turkey. The study shows the differences between the factors pushing Syrian workers into the informal sector (eg administrative obstacles, monetary and non-monetary benefits, unfamiliarity with labour regulations) and the reasons why Syrian business owners and self-employed worked informally (eg the desire to hire Syrian workers, inability to comply with labour regulations, and fear of deportation). By focusing on the reasons behind Syrian employers' decisions to remain in the informal sector, the article shows that such decisions were often based not on profit-seeking but on solidarity with fellow Syrians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to study the evolution of the Argentinean labor market over the last three decades in the light of an approach that takes into account the structural determinant of the national economic cycle: the relationship between the lag in international productivity and the availability of sources of compensation for it, at each moment in time, under the different models of accumulation. To this end, the dynamics of different relevant labor variables (employment, wages, the evolution of the urban informal sector, and the quality of employment) are analyzed in stages identified according to the general economic dynamics: 1991-2002, 2003-2011, and 2012-2021. The main conclusion is that only in instances of a particularly high flow of ground rent (2008-2011) a genuine improvement in the employment and living conditions of the Argentinean population was achieved, which failed to reverse the pronounced deterioration that had occurred since the mid-1970s. This deterioration was the result of a growing differentiation in the conditions of reproduction of the labor force, which has its correlation in the marked fragmentation that characterizes current Argentinean society vis-à-vis that of the early 1970s, which stood out in the regional panorama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over time, the role of women in the world of work has evolved and despite the implementation of new laws whose objective was to build a society and a more inclusive, participatory, democratic state, without discrimination, racism, hatred, or division. There are still inequalities towards women. This document will analyse the impact of labour inequalities in the informal market in the period 2006-2019 through the application of an econometric model of time series in relation to the variables Minimum Wage, Unemployment Women, Salaried Workers, and Level of Poverty. The results of the model lead us to conclude that the barriers imposed on women in the formal labour market led to unemployment among women continuing to increase and unfortunately, they have to seek income on a day-to-day basis, moving further into the informal sector in Bolivia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen: Siguiendo el marco de Dingeldey et al. (2021), pero con un enfoque cualitativo, se analiza la segmentación legal del trabajo en China, la India, Malasia y Viet Nam, prestando atención a los niveles de exclusión y a las jerarquías de protección otorgada. El autor observa varios factores que diferencian a estos países de los del Norte y que determinan sus mercados de trabajo: el tamaño relativo de la población activa que opera fuera de la cobertura efectiva de la reglamentación laboral; la terminología jurídica, de difícil traducción a los idiomas occidentales; y la historia jurídica, especialmente en lo que respecta al desajuste entre los marcos jurídicos y el mercado laboral resultante del colonialismo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen: En el presente artículo se examina cómo han evolucionado las funciones reguladoras de la legislación laboral en la región de la Comunidad de África Meridional para el Desarrollo (SADC) y se señalan casos de segmentación legal del mercado de trabajo. Los autores explican las características demográficas de la economía informal en los Estados miembros de la SADC y concluyen que, a pesar de la constitucionalización del derecho del trabajo, los mecanismos de legislación laboral de la región contribuyen sustancialmente a la segmentación legal de la economía. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is much debate around whether labor informality reflects situations of exclusion or whether it constitutes a valuable alternative for those who work in this sector. This paper contributes to the discussion by comparing the characteristics of those who move from the formal to the informal sector with the characteristics of those who remain in formal sector jobs during the 1995-2019 period in Argentina. Multinomial choice models are used for this purpose. The influence of such movements on the variation of wages is also evaluated. Both sets of evidence reveal that the positions in the informal sector, taken as a whole, do not seem to constitute a desirable destination for those who work in the formal sector. However, there is also evidence of heterogeneity in the informal sector, since the profile of those who move to one of its segments -that of employers- is consistent with the idea of voluntariness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen: Los estudios sobre plataformas digitales de trabajo indican que internet brinda nuevas oportunidades de ingresos en el mundo en desarrollo, pero no se ha investigado el uso de los medios en línea sin intermediarios en el sector informal. Utilizando datos de la etnografía digital y entrevistas con trabajadores en Indonesia, se examina cómo los mototaxistas y los trabajadores domésticos accedieron al mercado de trabajo por medios sociales durante la pandemia de COVID‐19 cuando las plataformas no estaban autorizadas a operar. Aunque los medios sociales ampliaban las oportunidades de empleo, el éxito dependía del tamaño de las redes sociales de los trabajadores y estaba limitado por los algoritmos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important to investigate the status of women's presence in different economic sectors and formal and informal economies. Also, considering the special situation of Iran in terms of increasing number of women with higher education and economic sanctions, identifying the effective factors for recognizing barriers to women's presence in economic, social, and cultural dimensions and providing solutions for removing those barriers is the need of the present time to obtain practical results for the field of employment policy. Accordingly, this study, after identifying the effect of these barriers on women's economic participation, intends to provide solutions to eliminate and reduce the effect of barriers and suggest appropriate solutions for creating opportunities and increasing women's economic participation. Based on the results, using a correlation test and multivariate regression, it was shown that three of them, economic, social, and occupational barriers had a negative and significant effect on women's economic participation in Iran's labor market, while the effect of institutional barriers was not statistically confirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers' preferences for jobs with social security coverage, it is found that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that provides them with such coverage. The estimation of a discrete choice econometric model which distinguishes between wanting a formal job and the probability of getting one shows that schooling increases the chances of being hired in formal employment and of having higher earnings in it. Women with greater responsibilities at home are less likely to want formal employment, and they also face a lower probability of being hired in such jobs. The findings indicate the segmentation of Mexican labour markets and the rationing of formal jobs, together with the existence of workers who voluntarily participate in informal employment. However, the estimated fraction of involuntary informal workers is quite high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document job characteristics for young, male, urban workers in Mexico, a country with high informal employment and increasing education levels. The informal sector is composed of two distinct parts: salaried informal employment and self-employment. On almost every measure, including wages, informal salaried jobs are of lower quality than formal salaried or self-employed ones. We characterize short-term job type transitions among these workers and show that education plays a key role when transitioning into the formal sector, whereas age is more strongly associated with transitions into self-employment. Persistence in and transitions into formal jobs are more likely for more educated workers. These workers also benefit from higher wage gains when this transition is from informal salaried jobs. On average, wages are higher for workers transitioning into self-employment, but less-educated workers benefit more. For these workers, self-employment can represent an outlet for entrepreneurial talent for some, but like informal salaried work, for others, it can be the sector of last resort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of thousands of migrant workers returned from their countries of employment to their families in Lao People's Democratic Republic. This article focuses on a specific population of migrant workers – Lao women returnee migrant workers in informal employment in Thailand – to explore how COVID-19 impacted their well-being and to what extent their home country's social protection system supported them. It is based on more than 400 structured interviews with women migrant workers across nine provinces of Laos, who were working abroad in the informal economy and returned to Laos at the beginning of the pandemic. The research documented a rise in unemployment and income loss while aggravating gender inequalities in terms of the division of unpaid care work, discriminatory behaviours, and potential risks of gender-based violence. It identified several policy areas where systemic support for Lao women returnee migrant workers in informal employment should be prioritised: (1) extension of social protection, (2) national labour market strategy plan, (3) migration-sensitive national action plan, and (4) co-ordination between government and civil society organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Se presenta un editorial que discute sobre la una concepción amplia del mundo del trabajo con el enfoque de la economía mundial de sector informal durante la pandemia covid-19. El articulo también se destaca sobre la a las repercusiones de la pandemia en el mercado del mundo laboral, las políticas laboral formuladas en la pandemia y la desigualdad social en la distribución del ingreso.

The present study aimed to characterize the insertion to the informal labor market in young people who are part of the tourism sector of Santa Marta, for which the employability resource was addressed, since it is understood that in informality there are also strategies, skills and knowledge that affects the income, permanence and mobility of the worker. For this, it was necessary to approach the phenomenon from an interpretive paradigm, with a qualitative perspective and phenomenological design, the sampling was by type case, in which nine young people between 19 and 27 years of age participated who were engaged in less unstable traditional informal work. The technique used was the semi-structured interview, Bardin's content analysis and the discursive practice of the narrative line were applied. The results allow us to recognize that young people are inserted into informality through close people, as well as develop the social skills necessary to be more attractive in this market, evidencing their employability in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In economies with dual labor markets, workers who work in the formal sector receive higher wages than those who work in the non-formal sector. This purpose of this article is to identify and quantify the weight of the determinants of the pay gap between formal and informal workers. To this end, a microeconometric decomposition is applied to differentiate between rewards for formality and punishments for informality in terms of pay. It was found that the gap exists and that it is sensitive to the distributional structure of labor income. The productivity of those employed in both sectors and the characteristics of the job explain a large part of the pay gap. The unexplained part could be due to the structure of the markets and the relative surplus labor force resulting from the low absorptive power of the capital accumulation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides evidence for the different potential effects of covid-19 on formal and informal employment, using the work-from-home (Dingel & Neiman, 2020; Saltiel, 2020) and the proximity occupation approaches (Mongey et al., 2020) in Colombia. We found that only 13 % of informal employment positions can be performed from home (remotely) and that the figure for formal employment is twice as large (20 %). We recoded the raw occupational responses of the Colombian Household Survey to a granular level to directly combine occupational information from two sources: O*net and step. We then calculated work-from-home estimates, extracting cohesive results from both sources. We investigated how personal and household characteristics relate to work-from-home and proximity and provide sound evidence for a larger effect on the informal population and its association with vulnerability (lower income and education levels, no internet access, poor working conditions). Standard employment policies will not impact directly on the most vulnerable populations in developing countries where informal employment is the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This is an empirical study of the labor market impacts of robot adoption in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico during the time period 2004. • Using an instrumental-variable approach and data from household we establish a causal relationship between changes in district-level adoption and employment, informality and wages. • We find that robots mainly replace formal salaried jobs, while the informal sector acts as a buffer for unemployment. • Young and semi-skilled workers are the most affected demographic group and face the highest probability of losing a formal. • Wages do not appear to be a sizeable mechanism of adjustment. We study the effect of robots on labor markets in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the major robot users in Latin America, during the period 2004–2016. We exploit spatial and time variations in exposure to robots arising from initial differences in industry specialization across geographic locations and the evolution of robot adoption across industries, to estimate a causal effect of robots on local labor market outcomes. We find that district's exposure to robots causes a relative deterioration in labor market indicators such us unemployment and labor informality. We document that robots mainly replace formal salaried jobs, affecting young and semi-skilled workers to a greater extent, and that informal employment acts as a buffer that prevents a larger increase in unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In 2013, Vietnam extended the required maternity leave from 4 months to 6 months. • We use difference-in-differences and triple-differences to evaluate the effects of this maternity leave extension on women's labor market outcomes. • The maternity leave extension encouraged women to move from agricultural household work into private formal employment. • Women primarily move into the manufacturing industry and middle-skilled occupations such as machine operators and clerks. Despite a sizable literature on the labor market effects of maternity leave regulation on women in developed countries, how these policies affect women's work in developing countries with a large informal sector remains poorly understood. This study examines how extending the maternity leave requirement affects women's decision to work in the informal or formal sector in Vietnam. We use a difference-in-differences approach to evaluate the 2012 Amendments to the Vietnam Labor Law, which imposes a longer maternity leave requirement than before. We find that the law increases formal employment and decreases unpaid work among women. This is driven by women switching from agricultural household work to employment in the private formal sector, especially in the manufacturing industry and among the middle-skilled occupations such as plant and machine workers, craft and related workers, as well as clerks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]