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Against a theoretical discussion of informalisation, the purpose of this paper is to trace wider commonalities and migratory interconnections that are leading to informalised or deteriorated employment conditions both East and West in the enlarged Europe.

The paper examines the ways in which informalisation has come increasingly to typify employment relations both East and West via contrastive case studies from Sweden and Latvia.

The paper illustrates how a growing tendency towards informalisation of work and economy comes about as a consequence of dual tendencies towards informalisation both “from above” and “from below”. Migrant labour has a part in this process, especially in the post-EU enlargement period, increasingly enabling free movement of labour from the former socialist countries to the West.

The implications of the paper are that the harmonisation of labour standards in the enlarged EU is not necessarily in an upward direction and that wider EU labour markets may be increasingly segmented as processes of informalisation grow in scope.

Policy-makers concerned with preserving labour standards and norms of decent work may consider the implications of the interconnected processes of informalisation and migration, in particular, with regard to “undeclared work”.

The paper raises issues concerning the European social model and its viability.

The paper bridges research on informalisation of the economy and labour migration in the context of EU enlargement.

The paper aims to examine the coexistence of formal and informal resource sectors in resource-dependent economies, whose production depends on an exhaustible (e.g. minerals) and a renewable resource stock (e.g. forest), respectively. It then examines the implications of declining mineral stocks on public revenues, labour movements between sectors, and economic growth in an attempt to elucidate the poor economic performance of many mineral-dependent countries.

The paper presents a theoretical model that describes the coexistence of a formal and informal resource-dependent sector, where individuals can direct their work effort. It then assesses how declining mineral stocks influence labour mobility across sectors and environmental degradation.

Decreasing mineral stocks induce a relocation of labour towards informal production and deprive local authorities from public revenues collected within the formal economy. This constrains the ability to improve infrastructure and welfare over time and simultaneously imposes pressure on the local environment.

The paper provides a novel theoretical mechanism that attempts to elucidate the “resource curse”, i.e. the poor economic performance of many mineral-rich economies. It purposely explores the implications of a coexistence of formal and informal resource activities on economic development for resource-dependent economies, in order to obtain new insights into this direction.

The purpose of this paper os to reveal the complex characteristics of informal employment and the difficulties of implementing policies to counteract this phenomenon.

Sections 1 and 2 review different theories on the causes and effects of informal employment, drawn from the international literature on the subject. Sections 3 and 4 present the results of field research conducted in Southern Italy with the intent of exploring the nature of informal employment. Section 5 illustrates and analyzes some cases of regularization processes drawn from further field research conducted in Southern Italy.

This paper reveals that the key factor to facilitate successful regularization is not only the willingness of entrepreneurs and/or workers to abide by the law but also other important variables such as entrepreneurial skills, the presence of welfare programmes and the business environment within which business activities take place. The main conclusion of this paper is that informal employment is often the result of a complex interaction of economic, psychological and social factors.

The practical implications of this conclusion are that, in order to successfully tackle informal employment, regularization policies have to be “tailored” to the specific context of their implementation.

This paper evaluates the wider applicability of the regularization policies used in Italy to harness informal employment.

Subcontracting is a crucial cause behind the simultaneous existence of formal and informal entrepreneurship in India. This article aims to provide an over-time comparative analysis between the subcontracted and the non-subcontracted enterprises within the informal sector. Further, it also brings to fore the contribution of subcontracting towards ensuring sustainability of the informal enterprises.

By constructing a panel data from two rounds of NSS Unincorporated Enterprise Survey Data (2010 and 2015), and employing a PSM-DID method, considering labour productivity and net retained earnings as two critical indicators of growth and development of the informal sector firms, this study has made some broad claims regarding the differences in immediate and long run performances between the subcontracted and non-subcontracted informal sector enterprises in India.

This study finds that subcontracted enterprises have not only been performing at a much lower level than the non-subcontracted enterprises, they are also growing much slowly than their counterparts. However, it has been observed that for the establishments, who are capital abundant and also have a larger production capacity, subcontracting is showing the prospect for deriving sustainable gains.

This article contributes to the existing literature in the following two ways. Firstly, it provides an over-time comparative analysis between the subcontracted and the non-subcontracted enterprises within the informal sector. Secondly, it brings to fore the contribution of subcontracting towards ensuring sustainability of the informal enterprises.

Conventionally, the marginalised population was considered to engage in child labour due to poverty, education or lack of other options, but indeed, a few children work voluntarily. However, a growing number of scholars, in recent years, have drawn their attention to the valuable question, “why children are engaged in child labour in the informal economy”. Even though a few studies have explored the motives of informal workers, to our knowledge not a single paper has explored the motives of child labourers working in the informal economy. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by evaluating the motives of child labourers, through three competing theorisations of the informal economy.

In this study, face-to-face structured interviews of 45 child labourers were conducted, who worked in different automobile workshops in the city of Lahore, Pakistan. Respondents were selected using the snowball sampling technique as this strategy is suitable for researching sensitive issues and is feasible for small sample sizes.

The main finding is that no single explanation is universally applicable to all child labourers. Some (27 per cent) justify their participation in the informal sector as driven by necessity (structuralist perspective), majority (40 per cent) explain their participation in the informal economy as a rational economic choice (neo-liberal perspective) and finally, more than a quarter of respondents (31 per cent) engaged in child labour due to their own free will or voluntarily to work for their family (post-structuralist perspective). This study also revealed that entrepreneurial spawning is a key determinant of child labour as the majority of children, in our study, working in automobile workshops intended to start their own workshop business in the future.

This article shows that children early engaged in work with entrepreneurial intention/spawning. Entrepreneurial education is very important in a child’s life. Entrepreneurial education will be a ticket to fulfill their dreams and learn new things with entrepreneurial attitude.

Government should develop the vocational training institutes for children who left the schools.

This study contributes to the body of literature by providing a better understanding of why children work in informal employment, an occupation generally perceived as constituting exploitative working conditions. This study also contributes to the wider literature of entrepreneurship by exploring “entrepreneurial spawning” as one of the major reasons underlying the participation of children in informal work.

To transcend the current debates about whether participation in the informal sector is a result of informal workers “exclusion” or their voluntary “exit” from the formal sector, the purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the existence of a dual informal labour market composed of an exit-driven “upper tier” and exclusion-driven “lower-tier” of informal workers.

To do this, data from a 2013 Eurobarometer survey involving 27,563 face-to-face interviews across the European Union is reported.

The finding is that in the European Union, there is a dual informal labour market with those participating in the informal sector due to their exclusion from the formal sector being half the number of those doing so to voluntarily exit the formal sector. Using a logistic regression analysis, the exclusion-driven “lower tier” is identified as significantly more likely to be populated by the unemployed and those living in East-Central Europe and the exit-driven “upper tier” by those with few financial difficulties and living in Nordic nations.

The results reveal the need not only to transcend either/or debates about whether participants in the informal sector are universally exclusion-or exit-driven, and to adopt a both/and approach that recognises a dual informal labour market composed of an exit-driven upper tier and exclusion-driven lower tier, but also for wider research on the relative sizes of these two tiers in individual countries and other global regions, along with which groups populate these tiers.

This is the first evaluation of the internal dualism of the informal sector in the European Union.

To transcend the long-standing debate regarding whether workers are driven into the informal economy by either their involuntary “exclusion” or voluntary “exit” from the formal economy, the purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the existence of a dual informal labour market composed of an exit-driven “upper tier” and an exclusion-driven “lower-tier” of informal workers, and to explore its policy implications.

To do so, data are reported from a 2015 survey of the informal economy conducted in South-East Europe involving 6,019 face-to-face interviews in Bulgaria, Croatia and FYR Macedonia.

Identifying a dual informal labour market with three exit-driven informal workers for every exclusion-driven informal worker, a multinomial logit regression analysis reveals that, compared to the exclusion-driven “lower tier”, the exit-driven “upper tier” is significantly more likely to be populated by the formally employed, retired and those not struggling financially. Participation is not affected by the perceived severity of penalties and likely risks of detection, but relative to those in the exclusion-driven “lower tier”, there is a significant correlation between those doing so for exit rationales and their lack of both horizontal trust and vertical trust in formal institutions.

The outcome is a call to transcend the conventional deterrence approach of increasing the penalties and risks of detection. Instead, to tackle those driven by exit rationales, tackling both the lack of horizontal trust that other citizens are operating in a compliant manner and the lack of vertical trust in formal institutions is advocated. To tackle exclusion-driven informal workers, meanwhile, a focus upon the macro-level economic and social conditions which lead to their participation is required.

This is the first paper to empirically evaluate the existence of a dual informal labour market and to evaluate its policy implications.

The primary motive of a minimum wage policy is to provide a wage floor for poorly paid workers and improve their welfare. In Nigeria, real minimum wage declined by 60 per cent between 1974 and 2011, thus reducing the welfare of workers. The wage gap between low skilled and high skilled workers have also widened over the years in favour of the latter. There are concerns that the series of minimum wage increase in Nigeria may not be welfare-enhancing. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study examined the welfare effects of minimum wage increase in Nigeria using a computable general equilibrium model. The model was calibrated using a 2006 Social Accounting Matrix and four sets of scenarios (20, 35, 50 and 140 per cent wage increases), were simulated.

The findings show that employers substituted other labour categories for minimum wage workers. This increases the wage rates of other labour. The consumer price index also increased as firms partly pass-on increased labour cost to consumers. Generally, the simulations show that minimum wage policies worsen the welfare of its intended beneficiaries, due to negative impact on prices and employment.

This study deviates from existing studies on minimum wage in Nigeria, by providing a proper disaggregation of the labour market that represents the Nigerian economy. In this regard, the informal sector was accommodated and the potential impact of the minimum wage on this sector determined. It also adopted the equivalent variation welfare measure which incorporates price and consumption effects in measuring welfare.

This paper uses the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) framework of Zomeren et al. (2008) to explain the organising experiences of the informal sector workers engaged in large number in the world's largest shipbreaking industry located in the western Indian town of Alang.

A single case study approach was adopted to understand the participation of shipbreaking workers in their trade union and factors that influence their participation.

Sense of cohesive collective identity and injustice alongside efficacy considerations have shaped the organising experiences and affected the participation of informal sector workers in their union. The trade union was able to overcome the scourge of invisibility that has been one of the dominant features of informal sector employment.

This paper treated union participation as unidimensional. Besides, the subjective conceptualization of strengths of perceptions of injustice, identities and efficacy considerations could be a limitation. The paper does acknowledge the gendered nature of shipbreaking but have not actively pursued it as a part of our research.

The findings of our study are an exemplar for those who intend to organise informal sector workers, especially precarious workers. The empirical findings allude to the role of trade unions in combating the invisibility, which is one of the defining features of informal sector workers through a distinctive, cohesive identity inculcated in those workers.

This paper has borrowed the SIMCA framework to explore union participation. Organising experiences of precarious workers from the developing world provides a contextual and an empirical novelty to our study.