This article sets out to investigate the reasons why some household businesses decide to register and become formal (while others do not) in order to shed light on the origins of informality. We use qualitative as well as quantitative data on household businesses (HB) derived from first-hand...

(english) The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of education on urban labour market participation and earnings in seven major West African cities. Our results show that although education does not always guard against unemployment, it does increase individual earnings in Abidjan,...

(english) We use a representative sample of informal entrepreneurs in Madagascar to add new evidence on the magnitude of the gender performance gap. After controlling for business and entrepreneur characteristics, female-owned businesses exhibit a value added 28 percent lower than their male...

(english) From official records, it would appear that the labour market significantly shifted from the formal to the informal sector in Kenya. However, a careful examination of different data sources for Nairobi show that in the 1990s there has been no direct transfer of employment from the...

(english) As labour income is the first source of income in developing countries, inequalities in the labour markets contribute in a large part to global inequalities. This paper aims at understanding how the socio-economic background of a person determines his opportunities in the labour...

(english) In this article, we develop indicators of vulnerability in employment in seven economic capitals of West Africa and study their links with individual incomes from the main job. We draw on data from the 1-2-3 Surveys in 2002-2003 to make a cross-country comparison using rigorously the...

With the use of comparable data from seven West African capitals, we attempt to assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrolment through the prism of allocation of labour and returns to skills across the formal and informal sectors. We find that people...

Little is known about the informal sector's income structure vis-à-vis the formal sector, despite its predominant economic weight in developing countries. While most of the papers on this topic are drawn from (emerging) Latin American, Asian or some African countries, Madagascar represents an...