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...
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...
Working Paper
The tax elasticity of formal work in African countries
A key policy problem in most developing countries is the size of the informal sector and its persistence over time. In need to increase their tax revenues, policy makers face a trade-off between decreasing tax rates (making formalizing potentially...
Working Paper
Will urbanization raise social mobility in the South, replicating the economic history of the West?
As developing countries rapidly urbanize, the number of people living in ‘slums’—neighbourhoods lacking property rights and basic services—continues to increase. Whether slum residents will ultimately share in the benefits of the cities they help...
Working Paper
Informal work in sub-Saharan Africa
Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labour 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
Financial disincentives to formal work
The aim of this paper is to quantify the financial cost that informal workers would incur in the event of entering formality, accounting for potential earnings gains upon entry. To do so, we use representative microdata from Ecuador and Colombia...
Journal Article
Motherhood and flexible jobs
Part of Journal Special Issue
Women’s Work
Project workshop
Transforming informal work and livelihoods — authors' workshop
Fri, 23 October 2020
Zoom,
Helsinki,
Finland
Past event
News
Press release - Professor Kunal Sen starts as the director of UNU-WIDER
‘Economic transformation needs to be accompanied by political and social transformations if we are to see drastic increases in human wellbeing’
Blog
To die from hunger or the virus: An all too real dilemma for the poor in India (and elsewhere)
by
Martha Chen
April 2020
On March 24, in a speech to the nation, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, announced a 21-day lockdown. With only four hours’ notice, 1.3 billion...
Working Paper
Informality, labour transitions, and the livelihoods of workers in Latin America
This paper studies the incidence and heterogeneity of labour informality in six Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru. We divide workers into five work statuses: formal wage-employed, formal self-employed...
Working Paper
Welfare and the depth of informality
This study explores the relationship between household poverty and depth of informality by proposing a new measure of informality at the household level. It is defined as the share of activities (hours worked or income earned) without social...
Working Paper
Motherhood and flexible jobs
We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.Our...
Working Paper
Ethnic diversity and informal work in Ghana
We present the first study that examines the effects of ethnic diversity on informal work. Using two waves of data from the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey, we find that ethnic diversity is associated with a higher probability of engaging in...
Working Paper
Informality and firm performance in Myanmar
Using a novel panel survey of enterprises in Myanmar, we compare the performance of manufacturing firms by three different informality definitions. The first is binary, based on whether firms pay taxes. The second captures five categories of...
Working Paper
Vulnerable employment of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Tunisian youth
Youths in the Middle East and North Africa face the highest unemployment rates in the world. Those who are employed are pushed to accept informal sector jobs that are insecure, unsafe, and lack non-wage benefits. Precarious employment is pervasive...
Working Paper
The labour market impact of COVID-19 lockdowns
In this paper, we provide causal evidence of the impact of stringent lockdown policies on labour market outcomes at both the extensive and intensive margins, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict...
Working Paper
Job quality and labour market transitions
In this paper we analyse informal work in Mexico, which accounts for the majority of employment in the country and has grown over time. We document that the informal sector is composed of two distinct parts: salaried informal employment and self...
Journal Special Issue
What sustains informality
The special issue contributes significantly to critical issues related to the nature of informal employment and its determinants, how informal firms can grow their business and productivity, and the effects of labour market regulations and social...
Working Paper
Heterogeneous informality in Costa Rica and Nicaragua
Informal work is often considered a place of employment for marginalized and vulnerable workers who have been rationed out of preferred formal work. However, informality can also be seen as a dynamic sector that budding entrepreneurs and those...
Working Paper
Precarization or protection? The impact of trade and labour policies on informality
Several episodes of market-oriented reforms in developing countries have been accompanied by a significant rise in work outside of the formal economy. This paper investigates whether the impact of increased exposure to trade on formal employment is...
Working Paper
Transforming informal work and livelihoods in Costa Rica and Nicaragua
We divide workers into six work statuses: formal self-employed, upper-tier informal self-employed, lower-tier informal self-employed, formal wage-employed, upper-tier informal wage-employed, and lower-tier informal wage-employed. In both Costa Rica...
Working Paper
By choice or by force?
Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers’ preferences for jobs with social security coverage, I estimate that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that...
Blog
Decent work and COVID-19 – it’s time for a just deal for all workers
Seven months into the unprecedented crisis of COVID-19, we already see significant effects on employment and earnings worldwide. The fallout could see...
Working Paper
Dynamics of off-farm self-employment in West African Sahel
This study uses detailed household-level data to analyse off-farm self-employment dynamics in Mali and Niger. It adds to the literature that acknowledges the existence of heterogeneities in informal work and the body of evidence on informal self...
Blog
COVID-19 intensifies global need to support informal workers in their struggle: Three guiding principles for a better deal
by
Martha Chen
August 2020
The world is facing an existential crisis that poses challenging questions: whether to put people and nature before owners of capital and technology...
Presentation
UNU-WIDER at WEAI Annual Conference
The 96th Western Economic Association International (WEAI) Annual Conference takes place online across 27 June to 1 July. This year’s programme includes a session chaired by Tim Gindling, Climbing the job ladder? Informal and formal work in a dynamic...
Mon, 28 June 2021
Online,
Los Angeles,
United States
Past event
Panel discussion
The good jobs challenge in developing countries – presentation at the 63rd ISLE Conference
The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE) hosts its 63rd Annual Conference in Rajiv Gandhi University, Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh 1–3 March 2023. On day two (2 March) of the conference, a panel discussion will explore the key findings of the...
Thu, 2 March 2023
Rajiv Gandhi University,
Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh,
India
Past event
Lecture
Kunal Sen delivers Valedictory address at the 63rd annual ISLE conference
The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE) hosts its 63rd Annual Conference in Rajiv Gandhi University, Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh 1–3 March 2023. On day three (3 March) of the conference, UNU-WIDER Director, Kunal Sen delivers the Valedictory...
Fri, 3 March 2023
Rajiv Gandhi University,
Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh,
India
Past event
Webinar
Kunal Sen at ILO: The good jobs challenge in developing countries
Tue, 25 April 2023
International Labour Organization ,
Geneva,
Switzerland
Past event
Policy Brief
How to create decent work for women
Despite advancements for gender equality in some spheres, labour market outcomes for women continue to be worse than for men. Gender gaps in pay, labour force participation rates, and measures of job quality are stubbornly persistent and continue to...
Working Paper
What traders know: the (mis)perceptions of formal and informal cross-border traders
Cross-border traders face a choice between official and unofficial border crossings. The latter allow them to evade taxes, but expose them to other risks, such as bribes, fines, and arrest. We investigate the perceptions of cross-border traders about...
Working Paper
Labour market inequality in two Asian giants
We examine the nature of labour market inequality in Indonesia and India, using a common conceptual approach drawing from the job ladder framework. In the framework, we differentiate between self-employment and wage-informal and between formal, upper...