Central to the scientific debate about the 'informal sector' and the validity of the concept used to be a twofold challenge. The crux laid not only in the objective to explain the widely visible persistence of the informal economy in developing countries, but also in the identification of its...

This paper empirically tests whether individual-level informality status is linked to a weak social contract, as measured through individual perceptions of its various aspects. Accounting for workers’ heterogeneity and a possible simultaneity between informality status and attitudes towards...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for a third of the countries on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list. In the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (ML/TF) Ranking and Risk Assessment Tool, the region performed poorly in terms of resilience to ML/TF, with more than 60% of...

In this paper it is argued that the domestic division of labor and trade is organized according to the same principle as the international division of labor and trade – the Ricardian comparative advantages. After all, the ultimate source of these comparative advantages is the individual. The...

The process of structural transformation forms the very basis of economic growth and development. This paper analyses the implications of alternate patterns of structural change for changes in the overall distribution of income within an economy. An empirical analysis is carried out based on...

In this paper we study the role of income distribution as a determinant of the size of the informal sector in an economy. We rely on a channel whereby inequality affects the behaviour of aggregate demand and thus influences the incentives a firm has to become informal. We further postulate that...

The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions through a feminist political economy lens and adopting a life-cycle approach...

We employ unique survey data collected in 2016 in two urban areas in Ghana – Accra and Tema – to examine gender and spatial gaps in sales and innovation. Multivariate decomposition analyses of the data uncover the following results: First, there is an unexplained spatial gap in sales between...

Using a standard overlapping generations monetary production economy, faced with endogenously determined tax evasion by heterogeneous agents in the economy, we provide a theoretical model that indicates that both a lower (higher) level of financial development and a higher (lower) level of...

Using a standard overlapping generations monetary production economy, faced with endogenously determined tax evasion by heterogeneous agents in the economy, we provide a theoretical model that indicates that both a lower (higher) level of financial development and a higher (lower) level of in...