This paper examines employment transitions in the South African labour market. Using the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, it analyses flows between the formal sector, informal sector, and unemployment, paying specific attention to how these flows differ during recessions. It explicitly...

Evasion of labor market regulations in middle income countries is systemic. This is generally known as informality. In Latin America, where less than 50% of workers are registered with social security, this is a permanent phenomenon and encompasses a variety of economic realities ranging from...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate two contrasting ways of explaining and tackling undeclared work. The rational economic actor approach theorizes undeclared work as arising when the benefits of undertaking undeclared work outweigh the costs, and the policy focus is upon deterring undeclared...

This paper provides an evidence-based evaluation of the competing ways of explaining and tackling the informal economy. Conventionally, participants have been viewed as rational economic actors who engage in the informal economy when the benefits outweigh the costs, and thus participation is...

While there is general agreement that regulatory avoidance is an important part of firms' decisions to produce in the informal sector, there is much less agreement on how regulation and enforcement affect firms' decisions on, inter alia, which sector they locate in, their employment decisions,...

The aim is to evaluate critically whether small businesses start-up in the informal economy and whether they do so to test-trade the viability of their businesses. Reporting a 2012 survey of 595 small business owners in the UK, 20% report trading informally when starting their business, 64% of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine whether men and women starting a business use the informal economy and do so to test the viability of their venture. Design/methodology/approach – To do this, the results of a survey of 595 small business owners in the UK conducted in August...

How many entrepreneurs start-up their business ventures conducting some or all of their trade in the informal economy? The aim of this paper is to answer this key question that has been seldom addressed using data from 600 face-to-face structured interviews conducted in Ukraine in late 2005 and...

Purpose – This paper aims to evaluate critically the conventional binary hierarchical representation of the formal/informal economy dualism which reads informal employment as a residual and marginal sphere that has largely negative consequences for economic development and needs to be...