The conventional portrayal of the formal/informal economy dichotomy endows the formal economy with positive attributes and the informal economy with negative characteristics. Recently, this hierarchy has been inverted by scholars portraying the informal economy positively as a chosen alternative...

Given the commonality of employment in the informal economy, this paper moves beyond classifying economies by the composition of their formal economies and instead classifies economies by their degree of informalisation. Analysing International Labour Organisation data on the varying level of...