Journal Article
The labour market impact of COVID-19 lockdowns
In this study, we provide causal evidence of the immediate and near-term impact of stringent COVID-19 lockdown policies on employment outcomes, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict stay-at-home...
Working Paper
Domestic revenue mobilization and informality
Effective domestic revenue mobilization has gained renewed urgency, especially in the light of the need to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. In taxation debates, the ‘informal sectors’ have hitherto been assumed to be a part of the problem and...
Blog
In memory of Ela Ramesh Bhatt — The gentle revolutionary
by
Martha Chen
November 2022
Ela Ramesh Bhatt, the founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India, passed away on 2 November 2022. Known as the ‘gentle...
Journal Article
Does the depth of informality influence welfare in urban sub-Saharan Africa?
We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members’ activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios...
Blog
Digital platforms and job search: Experimental evidence from Mozambique
Digital technologies can be deployed to improve job search, but their effectiveness in practice is disrupted. This column uses experimental data to...
Blog
Can access to finance spur entrepreneurship in Indian informal sector?
by
Ira N. Gang, Rajesh Raj Natarajan,
Kunal Sen
May 2022
Credit constraints, a consequence of the widespread failure of credit markets in developing countries, are widely regarded as a key constraint to...
Blog
The COVID-19 crisis, informal workers, and gender — understanding the intersections
by
Martha Chen
March 2022
The COVID-19 crisis — the pandemic, restrictions, and recession — has not been a grand leveler. While all of us, rich and poor, faced the fear and...
Working Paper
Towards sustainable livelihood in the Tanzanian informal economy
In spite of having some intensive national strategies to address poverty, Tanzania lacks a coherent national strategy to ensure sustainable livelihoods for those working in its informal economy, of which street vending is an important sector. Based...
Blog
Ghana's lockdown hit vulnerable workers hard: What needs to happen next time
Coronavirus lockdowns brought the world to a standstill. Rules on hygiene and social distancing have reshaped daily life, schools and businesses had...
Blog
Better measures of informality can improve poverty reduction policy
by
Eva-Maria Egger
May 2021
In a recent study, my co-authors and I propose a new way to measure informality by household, rather than by individual worker. We find that such an...
Blog
Precarization or protection? How labour policies influence the effects of globalization on informality
by
Lourenço S. Paz, Rita K. Almeida, Jennifer P. Poole
May 2021
Globalization has generally coincided with a rise in work outside the formal economy, intensifying job precarization — when high-quality, formal jobs...
Blog
Precarious employment for youth in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia
by
Shireen AlAzzawi, Vladimir Hlasny
May 2021
Youth (those aged 15–29) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face notoriously precarious employment prospects. Youth unemployment is the...
Blog
Ethnic diversity and informal employment in Ghana
Informal activities are widespread in many developing countries. In many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries informal economic activities account for...
Journal Article
Informal work in sub-Saharan Africa
Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labor markets of many low- and middle-income countries. A key issue in this regard concerns the extent to which informality itself is a persistent...
Working Paper
Female labour supply and informal employment in Ecuador
Low- and middle-income countries face a trade-off between raising tax revenue to strengthen social protection and creating incentives for the population to enter formal employment. However, empirical evidence on labour supply elasticities in the...
Journal Article
The tax elasticity of formal work in sub-Saharan Africa
When seeking to increase their tax revenues, policy-makers face a likely tradeoff between decreasing personal income tax rates (making formalizing more attractive and potentially contributing to revenue) and alternatively raising tax rates...
Working Paper
Minimum wage and tax kink effects in the formal and informal sector in Zambia
This paper explores two policy interventions in Zambia, a minimum wage hike in 2018 and an upward revision in the first kink in the progressive income tax schedule in 2017, to examine and compare the impact of minimum wage and tax kink changes on...
Working Paper
Mining spillovers and the formal–informal duality in manufacturing and services
This study examines the effects of mining productivity shocks on the formal–informal duality in manufacturing and services. Using firm census data from 2014 for Ghana, we measure the rates of informality along extensive (unregistered firms) and...
Working Paper
What explains the disaster preparedness of micro-enterprises?
Worldwide, enterprises are hit by disasters such as cyclones and floods. Despite being impacted negatively, most enterprises do not prepare for future disasters. This study aims at understanding the determinants of enterprises’ disaster preparedness...