Abstract
During recent decades, the need to understand and address informality has gained increasing attention, due to its far-reaching implications for economic development, social protection, and the functioning of labour markets worldwide. Informality is intrinsically linked to several crucial areas of high policy concern including poverty reduction, vulnerability, decent work deficits, and gender inequalities. As many millions of workers and enterprises around the globe operate within the informal economy, they often lack effective access to social protection, labour rights and secure livelihoods. Consequently, tackling informality is essential to ensure inclusive and sustainable development, and a critical enabler towards the achievement of social justice and the Sustainable Development Goals.
To design effective policies for poverty reduction, social protection, and labour market reforms, reliable, high-quality statistics on informality are indispensable. They provide essential insights into the scope, characteristics, and dynamics of informal work and enterprises, offering policymakers the tools to develop targeted interventions that can lead to positive change. However, obtaining robust data on the informal economy has been a challenge, particularly due to its complex and heterogeneous nature. While steady progress has been made in the availability of informality data, we still face challenges related to comparability, coverage, varying scope across countries and over time, and measurement approaches. The need for standardized and comprehensive statistical approaches is thus vital. While such problems are not unique to statistics on informality, they become particularly acute given the heightened policy interest in the topic, as demonstrated, for example, by the adoption by ILO's constituents in 2015 of Recommendation 204 on the Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recommendation.
Since 2013 the global labour statistical community has made significant strides in adopting a range of inter-related statistical standards, laying the foundation for a significantly enhanced understanding of the phenomenon of informality across the world. Standards adopted at successively the 19th (2013), 20th (2018) and 21st (2023) International Conferences of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) reset core definitions of employment, unemployment and different forms of work, and add to that core statistical infrastructure new definitions of work relationships and the informal economy. Referring in particular to the resolution concerning statistics on the informal economy agreed in October 2023, this new standard represents a milestone in the ongoing effort to enhance the quality, consistency, and comparability of statistics on the informal economy across regions, countries and statistical sources. It consolidates, updates and extends standards developed over the previous 30 years, providing a comprehensive measurement and indicator framework. When applied, the set of standards now available will massively enhance the understanding of the labour market, including the size of the informal economy, how it contributes to livelihoods and the extent of decent work deficits within it.
In this special edition of the journal, we are pleased to present a diverse collection of papers that reflect the latest advancements and ongoing challenges in the field of informality statistics. Through these varied perspectives, this issue sheds light on the evolving landscape of informality statistics, highlighting both the progress made and the hurdles that remain.
Their breadth demonstrates how far reaching the impacts of informality are, both for those tasked with measuring it, and those seeking to understand and influence it. Among the varied aspects captured, a few broad themes emerge across the papers. A number of the papers seek to explain and contextualise the newly developed standards and their impact, for example their impact on users, and the System of National Accounts. A second block of papers address the range of data needed to better understand informality, moving beyond the core definitions and demonstrating the need to collect information on topics such as asset ownership, earnings and various others in our standard data collection tools. These papers powerfully use available data to demonstrate and interrogate informality's impacts and drivers. A third block addresses the issue of sources – recognising and exploring the role that sources such as administrative data or different types of surveys can play in different settings. Taken together, these contributions serve to underline the important role that these new standards can play, as well as to show the means to apply them widely in an integrated and coherent manner. The contributions also demonstrate the wide relevance of the standards for both developed and developing countries, addressing the prejudice that informality is only of relevance in lower income settings.
The collective insights offered by this edition aim to foster a deeper understanding of how robust, harmonized statistics can inform policy, improve labour market conditions, and ultimately contribute to the reduction of poverty and vulnerability globally. As the fight against informality continues, the role of data remains central - equipping us with the evidence needed to drive sustainable and inclusive development forward.
