RETA 6430: Measuring the Informal Sector
Updated: June 2009
Production units belonging to the informal sector are highly mobile, seasonal, lacking of recognizable features for identification, and are usually reluctant to share information. Due to these characteristics, they are usually left out in surveys of national coverage commonly conducted by national statistics offices (NSOs); thus, data on this sector may not be regularly available. As a consequence, the national accounts statistics do not usually cover this sector, resulting to undercoverage of the economy. This lack of information is a major set back for private and government policymakers to fully understand the many social and economic issues related to informal sector activities, such as lack of social protection; limited access to credit, training, and markets; and differentials in wages and working conditions.
This project aims to address the aforementioned issues by (i) providing NSOs with a sound strategy for collecting data from the informal sector; (ii) supporting the integration of informal sector survey results into the compilation of national accounts statistics; and (iii) enabling agencies involved in planning, monitoring, and evaluating poverty-related policies to better understand the relationships between poverty and the informal sector.
The project has three major components: (i) development of the data collection strategy, (ii) data collection and analysis and (iii) economic and methodological research using the informal sector survey data. All three components will be completed by December 2010 and will cover three developing member countries -- Armenia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.
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Economics and Statistics 
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