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The purpose of this paper is to contribute original evidence about the conditions for formal and informal contracts for commodities and labour in the waste economy of a South Indian town.

Field research was exploratory, based on snowball sampling and urban traversing. The analysis follows capital and labour in the sub-circuits of capital generating waste in production, distribution, consumption, the production of labour and the reproduction of society.

Regardless of legal regulation, which is selectively enforced, formal contracts are limited to active inspection regimes; direct transactions with or within the state; and long-distance transactions. Formal labour contracts are least incomplete for state employment, and for relatively scarce skilled labour in the private sector.

The research design does not permit quantified generalisations.

Waste management technology evaluations neglect the social costs of displacing a large informal labour force.

While slowly dissolving occupational barriers of untouchability, the waste economy is a low-status labour absorber of last resort, exit from which is extremely difficult.

The first systematic exploration of formal and informal contracts in an Indian small-town waste economy.

This study aims to investigates the contribution of the informal sector towards secure livelihoods. Using a case study design, the study focusses on Mandela park, situated in Khayelitsha Township, Cape Town, in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Khayelitsha is predominantly an old township established by the apartheid government using unjust segregation laws to foster spatial planning that isolated people of colour in areas with insufficient infrastructure and informal economic activities. Therefore, informal trading became a survival strategy in Khayelitsha, attracting an increasing number of informal traders in public spaces within the township in pursuit of livelihoods. Informal activities are generally conducted to generate income and secure sustainable livelihoods.

This study uses a qualitative research design, incorporating structured interviews instrumental in data collection and in-depth thematic analysis.

The study findings reveal that the informal sector positively contributes to the sustainable livelihoods of those involved in the informal sector and the relatives of those through income generation, family support, wealth creation, source of employment, business incubation and innovation and creativity.

The study concludes that given the increasing unemployment rate in South Africa, caused by the stagnant economic growth rate, policymakers should rethink their policies on the informal economy, acknowledge the sector's relevance and support the sector.

The paper validates the threshold argument in the informality–poverty nexus. Recent literature and policy have argued the existence of a threshold in the relationship.

The study adopts dynamic panel threshold analysis, estimated within the framework of system Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) to control for endogeneity and simultaneity. Data from 40 selected sub-Saharan African countries between 1991 and 2018 are used for the study.

Empirical results confirm the existence of an average threshold of 31% share of informality in GDP. Also, the paper finds that threshold of informality that addresses mild and severe poverty varies between 24.32 and 36.75%.

The work is limited to African economies. Evidence from other emerging and developed economies is suggested for further research.

Overall, the empirical results indicate a threshold in the informality–poverty nexus. Therefore, an excessive informality level does not benefit the African growth process. Policymakers and governments are advised to operate within the bounds of the threshold of informality that reduces poverty and improve the African economic growth process.

The paper is the first study to provide empirical findings on the nonlinear and threshold argument in the informality–poverty nexus, as far as the authors know.

This article aims to explore the engagement of refugees and asylum seekers (RAS) in informal and precarious jobs from a civil society actors' perspective. Despite a burgeoning literature on refugee integration and a focus on institutional integration programmes, little is known about the early insertion of RAS into informal and precarious employment as an alternative to subsidised integration programmes, when these are available.

This article draws on rich qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews with social workers, volunteers and other professionals supporting migrants.

Data analysis shows that migrants' insertion in informal jobs and their rejection of integration programmes may be the result of people's need to access financial capital to cover actual and future needs. Although such an engagement may be criticised for hampering RAS’ integration, it can be seen as an important source of agency against insecurity surrounding one's legal status.

This article highlights the importance of legal status precarity in shaping informal workers' agency and perceptions of them, opening up a debate on the relevance of informal work in terms of long-term integration and future migration trajectories.

This article intends to investigate on the undeclared work (UW) by involving several features, which can be evaluated throughout a set of appropriate variables. The REBUS-PLS (Response Based procedure for detecting Unit Segments–Partial Least Squares) has been proposed in order to support policy decisions targeted to this heterogeneous scenario. The authors refer to Italy, due to the disparity of its territorial districts, but the conclusions can be extended to different European countries.

A total of 2,877,000 firms has been involved for empirical analysis. The manifest variables have been obtained by fixing both NACE codes and the NUTS2 level.

The analysis confirms that the model is suitable to evaluate the effects of the indicators connected to ‘Labour force’, ‘Tax system’, ‘Non-Profit Organizations’, and ‘Migrants’. Special prominence has been dedicated to the labour inspections' features.

If the management designs the policy actions by using the model proposed, a critical evaluation of the implications is needed, by focusing different perspectives and several weaknesses.

Assuming that the Italian regions are relatively homogeneous, results reveal no significant correlations to the UW, except for the taxes. In contrast, the involvement of the heterogeneity shows that the UW significantly depends on the changes of Labour force, Tax system and NPOs dimensions, in 11 out of 18 Italian regions. No clear evidence emerges from Migrants feature, which seems to have a negatively impact on the UW.

To the authors' knowledge, compared to the previous research papers, the analysis of the UW via REBUS-PLS and the mentioned manifest variables, has never been undertaken so far.

Motivated by a lack of evidence regarding the effect of migration on entrepreneurship in a highly informal country, such as Colombia, this paper has a twofold purpose. First, it explores how Venezuelan immigration affects entrepreneurial activity in Colombian regions. Second, it intends to shed light on this relationship, by distinguishing between formal and informal sectors.

With a sample of 1,776,063 individuals, from the Labor Survey Gran Encuesta Integrada de Hogares (GEIH) from the Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE), the authors employ an instrumental variable approach to account for the selection of immigrants into locations with more or less desirable conditions.

The results suggest Venezuelan immigration positively influences self-employment and own-account workers, but negatively affects employers. However, once these immigrants proliferate in the informal sector, the effects increase.

This paper brings new insights into the intersection between immigration, unofficial economies, and entrepreneurship. First, while the prior literature focuses on migration from developing to developed countries, migratory flows between developing economies and its effects on local entrepreneurial activity remain unexplored. Second, although informality is mostly common in developing countries, little (albeit growing) evidence of its role in the relationship between migration and entrepreneurship research exists. Finally, the authors bring together these two phenomena to enhance our understanding of different types of entrepreneurial activities when immigration and informality take place. Policy implications are derived from these insights.

Although the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic appears to disproportionately affect those in informal employment, they often receive less government support than the formally employed. This paper considers definitions of the informal economy and informal employment, explores the rationale for participating in the informal economy and reflects on some effects of the pandemic on these workers.

The paper presents a narrative literature review with analysis of the selected academic and policy literature.

There are considerable short- and long-term implications of the pandemic for informal employment and the informal economy. This occurs against the background of unresolved tensions arising from informal workers' desire for more employment security and employers' striving for continued labour flexibility while transferring costs to government and workers. The COVID-19 pandemic might accelerate current trends and force new solutions to better protect basic work security while helping organisations to remain competitive. Government policies supporting work safety, income security, moves to formalisation of employment and fairness for informal employees are particularly important.

As statistical and qualitative evidence is currently limited, it is too early to identify the full effects of COVID-19 on employment in the informal economy.

The results suggest that governments need to carefully consider explicit support for those in informal employment to create fair, resilient and ethical structures for workers, businesses, economies and wider societies.

The paper identifies some of the social implications of COVID-19 for the informal sector.

The analysis offers initial insights into the impacts of a major health, economic and social shock on informal working.

The purpose of this paper is to assess ways in which informality can be understood and reviews an emerging area of management scholarship. The origins and nature of informality are discussed with the aid of two different theoretical tools: “workplace sociology” (WS) and “mixed embeddedness” (ME).

The analysis is grounded in empirical material reflecting different aspects of informality mainly within the ethnic economy, such as a study on the implementation of the National Minimum Wage regulations (Ram et al., 2007; Jones et al., 2004, 2006).

The authors argue that the combination of WS and ME provides a valuable means of content and character of informality. It can also help to explaining variations and patterns within the informal economy, as well as understanding new forms of informality in the ethnic economy and beyond in “superdiverse” contexts.

This paper bridges two different theoretical approaches to explain the interactions between the firm and state regulations, as well as the workplace relations between employer and employees.

This study aims to investigate the factors that affect the likelihood of formalizing informal sector activities in 13 Sub-Saharan African countries, using World Bank enterprise survey data collected between the periods 2009 and 2018. Notwithstanding the great contribution of the informal economy in Africa, developing countries may stand to gain more if they make inroads in formalizing the informal sector.

Since the dependent variable is binary taking the value of one if the firm is willing to formalize and zero otherwise, the study will employ a discrete choice probit model.

Results inter alia show that firms that are more likely to formalize are young, owned by individuals with high levels of education and, have registered before. Governments should therefore target firms that are young and provide them with information about the benefits of registration, and if these firms are owned by experienced and educated individuals, the likelihood for them to register would be high.

The study uses cross sectional data and therefore cannot capture time variant factors affecting the probability to register and also cannot correct effectively for endogeneity.

Governments should therefore target firms that are young and provide them with as much information as possible about the benefits of registration, and if these firms are owned by experienced and educated individuals, the likelihood to convince them to register would be high. They should also reduce the cost of registration so as to improve net benefits in line with the rational exit view.

Formalizing informal activities will help improve the performance of these firms, reduce vulnerable employment as well as crime, poverty and inequality. Providing decent operating and working conditions to informal players will reduce social and political unrest.

The African continent is home to many informal firms accounting for roughly 55% of economic activity with 90% of workers eking out a living in a sector that does not respect worker rights, provide decent working conditions and where changes in growth have done little to reduce its size. Regulatory reforms have also been implemented resulting in the number of start-up registration procedures falling from 11 in 2003 to seven in 2019. The uniqueness of Sub Saharan Africa in terms of entrepreneurial culture, political, institutional and economic conditions as well as lack of consensus in the extant empirical literature make this study pertinent.

This paper aims to study the extent of use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the modern organization; to comprehend the changing nature of future jobs in the context of application of AI; and to study the impact of AI on the economy of the country with special reference to the job market. Given the critical scenario of labor intensive Indian economy, the paper intends to show how AI shall affect rather coexist with human intelligence or labor.

The research on implementation of AI in different industries and its effect on job market are at a nascent stage. There is a dearth of literature. Hence, this study followed a qualitative approach to have a better understanding of the research questions as Bhattacherjee (2012) confirms that employing an interpretive paradigm (qualitative analysis as the analysis of data, e.g. data from interview transcripts) is the more productive way to study social order and that it is achieved through “subjective interpretation of participants involved, such as by interviewing different participants and reconciling differences among their responses using their own subjective perspectives”. Sample selection: The selection technique utilized is purposive sampling. The respondents in this research are the general managers and HRs from different companies. A total of 14 senior professionals from various sectors were approached for the interview out of which seven people gave their consent to take interview. Seven senior HR professionals, mainly general managers and HRs from various sectors viz. oil and gas sector, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, media, power and energy and retail were interviewed to understand how they are using AI in their respective fields. Inclusion Criteria: (1) Generally, the people covered under the research are from the decision-making level of their companies so they are in a position to give strategic perspective as well as day to day implication of implementation of AI. (2) Respondents have adequate knowledge of the respective industry to which they belong. (3) Respondents have reasonable industry of dealing with Human Resource Management and national economy as a whole assessment tool and its administration procedures. A narrative approach was adopted to have a better understanding of the research questions and comprehend their views regarding implementation of AI in their respective companies. A semi structured open ended interview was administered to steer the discussion around the research questions. The respondents were interviewed over the phone and each respondent shared their stories. Analysis of data: The narrations were then transcribed by online transcriber website otter.ai.com. The common keywords as prescribed by the website are as: AI, strategy, learning and implementation. The extracts of the discussions are noted in the next segment of the paper. As and when required this research also used secondary data from the journals, literature available in the websites to understand the implementation of AI globally.

A country where the government itself admits 90% of its workforce belongs to informal sector and conspicuously exits a multi-faceted stark digital divide (Huberman, 2001; DiMaggio et al., 2001; Guillen, 2006; Servon, 2002) wherein gap of digital divide is significant between the rural and urban India (Dasgupta et al., 2002; Nath, 2001; Singh, 2007; Mahajan, 2003; Dutta, 2003) talking of educating, applying and implementing AI seems to be “ a distant dream” but an “ambiguous ambition ”

Prior to implementation of AI that India has to ensure, the basic hygiene factors of informal sector labor force like social security, 2008, low wages and lack of legal protection, unpaid overtime and occupational health problems, poor bargaining power, working without leave under coercion, child care issues and health ailments(for which mere legislation or statutarization is just a formality executed than taking real action) to take the majority of Indian workforce to attain the motivational factor to acquire the knowledge and skill of AI and to implement it.

The AI and its adoption are still at their embryonic stage in Indian companies. With the adoption of such sophisticated technology, in one side, the organizations are dreaming of efficiency, higher productivity and better organizational performance whereas on the other side requirement of changing skill sets and decreasing manpower, creating fear among the mass, which results in hard resistance against the implementation process of AI. On the other hand, lack of expertise and high cost of adoption is also hindering AI to implement in the organizations. The adoption and implementation stage of AI vary from organization to organizations, as well as functions to functions. While the marketing departments of several organizations are using advanced level of AI, there, the HR departments are using AI at the very initial stage. But it is evident from the above discussions that adoption of AI in business functions is inevitable and only it is a matter of time. With the COVID-19 pandemic this has become the utmost necessity for many organizations, particularly who works across the globe. HR partners of the businesses are also adopting AI at a fast pace to do away with the mundane works and deliver efficient services to the stakeholders. It is understood from the discourse that the prerequisite for a successful implementation of AI across the industries throughout the country, needs a concerted effort from industries, academia and government.

The answer lies in Keynesian economics. The central tenet of which is government intervention rather investment to stabilize and progress the economy by way of spreading Internet connectivity, basic literacy and computer literacy, then only truly AI can be effective in a greater scale.

A study on application of artificial intelligence in the pandemic era from a wider perspective, this work is an empirical investigation into the benefits and limitations of artificial intelligence for human potential and labour -intensive pandemic ridden Indian economy.