This paper provides an analysis of recent reforms of tax-benefit systems and a preliminary assessment of their impact on financial incentives to work and on labour supply. Many Member States have introduced policies to “make work pay” and have targeted low-wage workers with the aim of...

The purpose of this paper is handling the informal sector in Egypt and the role it can play in accelerating the development process and poverty reduction. The structure of the paper starts with an introduction, and then gives a definition of development and its objectives in order to give a...

This report presents a statistical profile of informal employment in South Africa from 2005 to 2007, using September Labour Force Surveys. In particular, the report uses descriptive analysis to identify the extent and composition of informal employment and its recent trends. It describes the...

The purpose of this paper is to present an extended version of the IS/LM model, with illegal economy and money laundering in a closed economy, which allows an macroeconomic analysis of the effects of this presence on short-term equilibrium. Without disregarding the FATF´s money laundering...

The Informal Economy provides employment to more than 60 per cent of the labour population in the developing world despite being a site unfettered by regulations and social norms of fairness governing pay and work conditions. In assessing the factors behind an informal agent’s decision to...

In this paper, we introduce firm heterogeneity in the context of a model of non-compliance with minimum wage legislation. The introduction of heterogeneity in the ease with which firms can be monitored for non compliance allows us to show that non-compliance will persist in sectors which are...

Although the size of the informal economy is relatively large across Latin America and the Caribbean, it is not completely understood how deficiencies in the institutional environment may be related either to the propensity for entrepreneurship or the performance of entrepreneurs in the informal...

Having in view the three main methods for the estimation of the informal economy's size, the study focuses in the first part on data and methodological problems, trying at the same time to outline a few behavioral aspects by using only simple simulation models. Thus, based on a 288-sample and...

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the causes and consequences -- in particular, the policy implications -- of the ongoing urbanization in Bangladesh. Like many other Asian developing countries, a rapidly increasing share of the population of Bangladesh migrates to urban centers in...

This paper uses annual data for the period 1970-2006 in order to estimate and investigate the evolution of the Mexican informal economy. In order to do so, we model the informal economy as a latent variable and try to explain it through relationships between possible cause and indicator...