Despite the emergent recognition that many in the informal economy work on a self-employed basis, few have evaluated the extent and character of such endeavour. To start to fill this gap, a 2007 Eurobarometer survey composed of 26,659 face-to-face interviews in 27 European countries is reported....

In advanced economies, work beyond employment has been viewed very differently depending upon whether it is paid or not. Whilst unpaid work, especially voluntary work, has been perceived as something to be nurtured in order to rebuild trust and reciprocity in communities, paid informal work has...

Despite the widespread assumption that informal employment is more prevalent amongst those not in the formal labour market, there have been no evaluations of the extent and nature of informal employment amongst the student population, who are in most nations a prominent group of those not in...

Informal employment has been variously explained as resulting from: economic under-development and a lack of modernisation (modernisation theory); high taxes and state interference in the free market (neo-liberal theory) or inadequate levels of state intervention to protect citizens (political...

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,...