To help countries make progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Indicator 8.3.1 ("Proportion of informal employment in non-agriculture employment, by sex"), this paper presents an integrated strategic policy approach. This is where: a national government facilitates the...

This article evaluates critically the competing explanations for informal sector entrepreneurship that read such endeavours to result from either ‘exclusion' from state benefits and the circuits of the modern economy or the voluntary ‘exit' of workers from formal institutions. Reporting...

Drawing inspiration from institutional theory, a small sub-stream of literature has proposed that participation in the informal economy arises from the lack of alignment of a society's formal institutions (i.e. its codified laws and regulations) with its informal institutions (i.e. the norms,...

The aim of this paper is to map the spatial variations in the size of the shadow economy within Brussels. Reporting data provided by the National Bank of Belgium on the deposit of high denomination banknotes across bank branches in the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, the...

This paper evaluates critically whether the cross-national variations in the size of the informal economy are the result of: under-development (a modernisation perspective); high taxes, corruption and state interference (neo-liberal perspective), or inadequate state intervention to protect...

To evaluate whether and how the prevalence and nature of off-the-books entrepreneurship varies across deprived and affluent neighborhoods in an advanced economy, face-to-face interviews are here reported conducted with 511 households in English affluent and deprived urban neighborhoods. The...

This paper evaluates critically whether women‘s paid informal work is low-paid market-like work conducted for the purpose of economic gain. Drawing upon interviews with 400 households in UK lower-income urban neighbourhoods, we show that only a small segment of the paid informal work conducted...

Purpose – The magnitude of the informal economy has been estimated using either indirect measurement methods that employ proxy indicators or small-scale household surveys. This paper seeks to provide an analysis of the findings of the first direct survey in an advanced market economy of...

The aim of this paper is to challenge the characterization of paid informal work as a form of employment based on exploitative relations that should be eradicated. Using empirical evidence gathered through structured interviews with 511 households in deprived and affluent neighborhoods in...