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"Informal labor"
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Does Regulatory Quality Reduce Informal Economy? A Theoretical and Empirical Framework
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.
Journal Article
Insecurity, Dispossession, Depletion: Women’s Experiences of Post-War Development in Myanmar
This article explores the gendered dynamics of Myanmar’s post-war economic reforms through an analysis of women’s experiences of development in Kayah (Karenni) state. In Myanmar, ceasefires and a reduction of armed violence combined with state-driven economic liberalization reforms are conditioned by, but also contribute to remake, gendered relations of power, privilege and marginalization. While new land legislation and development projects have contributed to loss of land and livelihoods among rural populations in general, our study demonstrates that women living in conflict-affected border areas are disproportionally affected. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, we show how this is directly related to an overarching gendered political economy defined by legacies of conflict, discrimination and uneven processes of development, which positions women as particularly vulnerable to new forms of insecurity, dispossession and depletion generated by post-war economic transformations. We argue that the political and economic legacies of war in the state has produced a gendered division of labor that positions women as responsible for unpaid and underpaid informal and social reproductive labor, weakens women’s access to land, and results in physical, material, and emotional depletion. Through this focus, our study adds to research on development and economic restructuring in post-war contexts in general, and to emergent scholarship on Myanmar’s economic reforms in particular.
Journal Article
The shadow economy : an international survey
\"Illicit work, social security fraud, economic crime, and other shadow economy activities are fast becoming an international problem. This second edition uses new data to reassess currency demand and the model approach to estimate the size of the shadow economy in seventy-six developing, transition, and OECD countries. This updated edition argues that during the 2000s the average size of a shadow economy varied from 19% of GDP for OECD, to 30% for transition, and to 45% for developing countries\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Analyzing the Impact of Informal Labor Sector Regulation in the Context of International Trade: A Theoretical Approach
I analyze the relationship between international trade and welfare using a theoretical model of heterogeneous firms with a labor market segregated between informal and formal firms. The segregation in this case is a result of the introduction in the market of a regulatory threshold, according to which firms having less than a certain quantity of workers are defined as informal, otherwise they are formal and should pay additional fixed and marginal labor costs. This threshold creates a situation where it is endogenously more profitable for the
firms to scale back production to avoid formal labor costs. The numerical solution of the model shows that, after trade openness, a share of the
firms become
, and that the
become
. The welfare in the economy decreases because of the shrinking of firms, the higher prices, and the reduction of available varieties. Likewise, the comparative static exercise yields evidence that a decrease in the regulatory threshold forces informal firms to become formal; therefore, under full employment conditions, such a policy increases all average wages and raises welfare.
Journal Article
Transitions between informal and formal employment: results from a worker survey in Bangladesh
We study transitions between different types of formal and informal employment using retrospective job histories from a new survey in Bangladesh. Workers transitioning between jobs are most likely to remain in the same type of employment, although there is still substantial churn across employment types. Private wage employees have higher probability of transitioning to a new job, and changes in earnings and benefits suggest evidence of upward mobility. Nevertheless, there is also non-trivial risk of downward mobility, especially for those transitioning into casual employment, which has the lowest level of earnings and benefits and the highest levels of exposure to workplace hazards and violence. Overall, the informal sector appears to include subpopulations consistent with both the traditional view that it is a segmented portion of the labor market with few prospects of upward mobility, and with the alternative view that it is a dynamic, entrepreneurial alternative to wage employment.
Journal Article
Minimum Wages in a Segmented Labor Market: Evidence from South Africa
The segmented labor market model describes the impacts of minimum wages on covered and uncovered sectors. This paper examines the impacts of an industry-specific minimum wage in South Africa, a state characterized by high unemployment, a robust union movement, and the presence of a large informal sector. Under the industry-specific wage law, formal agricultural and household workers are covered, while workers in other sectors are not. The unique aspect of this paper lies in the ability to compare the impacts of minimum wage legislation on formal covered, informal covered, formal uncovered, and informal uncovered workers. This natural experiment allows us to test whether industry-specific minimum wage legislation leads to higher wages, whether wage increases are restricted solely to covered formal sectors or if there are spillover effects, and whether such legislation manifests in disemployment effects. We find evidence of higher wages yet disemployment among black workers in formal markets. In informal markets we find no employment effects, but higher wages in formal markets appear to have spilled over into informal markets in covered sectors.
Journal Article
Analysis of factors influencing credit access of Vietnamese informal labors in the time of COVID-19 pandemic
Credit is considered as an essential tool to make informal labor's income better. In order to improve quality of their life, the state should have some supports them in credit access. This study analyzes factors causing credit access of informal labors to be changed in the time of COVID-19 pandemic. Using survey data collected from 2020 VHSSL (2019-2020), this approach has two models including a binary logit model and a multinomial logit model (MLM). The results revealed that the positive factors including education, material, collateral, credit size, credit source, credit debt which are likely to affect to credit access, however age, family size, ethnicity, interest, paid money are negative. Besides, it also concludes that quality of life of informal labor is considerably influenced by credit access, collateral, credit source, credit debt from the observed samples. Additionally, this paper recommends some policies to enhance informal labor's access to credit and their quality of life.
Journal Article
Wages and Informality in Developing Countries
We develop an equilibrium wage-posting model with heterogeneous firms that decide to locate in the formal or the informal sector and workers who search randomly on and off the job. We estimate the model on Brazilian labor force survey data. In equilibrium, firms of equal productivity locate in different sectors, a fact observed in the data. Wages are characterized by compensating differentials. We show that tightening enforcement does not increase unemployment and increases wages, total output, and welfare by enabling better allocation of workers to higher productivity jobs and improving competition in the formal labor market.
Journal Article