The paper uses panel data for up to ten Latin America countries for the period 1990-2000 to analyse whether informal employment functions as a cyclic buffer for formal employment as well as whether women's employment functions as a cyclic buffer for men's employment. The paper also evaluates...

This paper addresses three central issues in the debates on informal employment: trends in informalization, informal employment as a macroeconomic buffer over business cycles, and the effects of higher labour standards and stronger de facto worker rights on informal employment. In particular, we...