Suchergebnisse

Informal firms make up a major share of the economy in most developing countries. Expanding formalization could increase government tax revenues, boost firm profits and national income, and increase employee well-being by improving access to social security and health and workers' benefits. Reforms to encourage firms to register include simplifying procedures, reducing the cost and time to register, and making more information available on registration procedures. Reforms might not result in higher registration and formalization.In some cases, better enforcement and wider development policies might be needed as well.

AbstractInformality in the labour market is far from clearly defined in the development literature. To understand the nature of informality in terms of the legalistic and the productivity view, this paper makes an empirical contribution to the debate.This paper provides a detailed analysis of the informality dimensions in the Mexican labour market, employing a rich labour market data set.A substantial overlap between the current social security coverage, contracts and individual's job history is found. Moreover, age, education, marital status and scores in the Raven's test, an ability measure, are significant determinants for the various forms of informality. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper investigates a puzzle in the literature on labor markets in developing countries: labor legislations not only have an impact on the formal labor market but also an impact on the informal sector. It has even been argued that the impact on the informal sector in the case of the minimum wage is stronger than on the formal sector. Using quasi-experiments of minimum wage changes and thereby exploiting geographical variation of the minimum wage bite, I find evidence for this hypothesis. Informal workers, workers without social security contribution, experienced significant wage increases when the minimum wage was raised while formal workers did not. This result highlights that non-compliance with one labor legislation, the social security contribution, does not necessarily imply non-compliance to other labor laws such as the minimum wage.

This paper explores the labor market, poverty, inequality and pro-poor growth dynamics in the recent economic crisis and recovery in Argentina. In the labor market it is possible to see the diverging experience of the economic crisis and recovery. For instance, the unemployed were more likely to find employment in the informal sector than in the formal sector. In terms of economic sectors it seems that certain labor-intensive, dynamic, low-skilled sectors such as manufacturing, other services, construction and retail contributed most to the movement between the different labor force states of employment, unemployment and inactivity. Policy responses in the labor market to poverty and inequality increases from the economic crisis were implemented through government transfers, in particular the workfare program Plan Jefes y Jefas. The pro-poor features of the early economic recovery period were mainly accounted for by these government transfers. However, at later stages of recovery income increases of the poor are less attributed to government transfers and more due to the pro-poor pattern of growth itself.