Pension Design with a Large Informal Labor Market: Evidence from Chile This paper investigates empirically the fiscal and welfare trade-offs involved in designing a pension system when workers can avoid participation by working informally. A dynamic behavioral model captures a household’s labor supply, formal/informal sector choice and saving decisions under the rules of Chile’s canonical priva...

We identify the need for a theory of demand for health insurance suited to the informal sector in lowand middle income countries (LMIC) where some 3 billion people lack health cover. Excluded from formal governance structures, they rely on informal arrangements by which rulesin-use shape choices, behaviours and decisions. We explore the fundamental assumptions of standard economic theories of d...

This article argues that neither the share of the workforce in self-employment nor the labor turnover rate are useful measures of labor market distortion or rigidity unless adjusted for country-specific economic and demographic variables. A growth model that incorporates efficiency wage effects and offers an alternative to traditional models of informal self-employment is developed and is used ...

The provision of safely managed sanitation in informal settlements is a challenge, especially in schools that require durable, clean, sex-segregated facilities for a large number of children. In informal settlements in Nairobi, school sanitation facilities demand considerable capital costs, yet are prone to breakage and often unhygienic. The private sector may be able to provide quality facilit...

We develop a multi-sector model of labor markets in developing countries in which workers can be in any of four states i) employed in the formal urban sector, ii) employed in the informal urban sector, iii) unemployed in the urban sector or, iv) employed in agriculture. Workers differ in the productivity of formal sector employment and there are floor wages below which firms can’t set wages. Mi...

objective: to understand the knowledge and services of informal providers and to explore their role in addressing the human resource gap in uttar pradesh, india, within the context of maternal health. materials and methods: the study is exploratory in nature, conducted in four blocks of four districts of uttar pradesh state, india. semi-structured interviews were conducted with 114 informal pro...

In a sample of Tanzanian formal sector workers the vast majority have a desire for working longer hours in their main job, and supplement earnings through participation in informal production. Determinants of participation in informal production are examined through estimation of structural-form Logit models. A new way around the problem of measuring incomes from informal production is suggeste...

Informal economics is a field of study which applies to every state in the world. The dynamics of this “shadow” economy infiltrate the entirety of markets, affecting governments, citizens, producers, and consumers. As a result of this deep infiltration, a significant amount of resources have been committed to unraveling the mysteries of the informal economy. Over the course of the last two deca...