A large percentage of workers and firms operate in the informal economy, outside the line of sight of governments in emerging market and developing economies. This may hold back the recovery in these economies from the deep recessions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic--unless governments adopt a broad set of policies to address the challenges of widespread informality. This study is the first comprehensive analysis of the extent of informality and its implications for a durable economic recovery and for long-term development. It finds that pervasive informality is associated with significantly weaker economic outcomes--including lower government resources to combat recessions, lower per capita incomes, greater poverty, less financial development, and weaker investment and productivity.

The increasing visibility of individuals engaging in small-scale business enterprises outside formal wage employment has been a topic of debate for many years, in many countries. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is no exception. In fact, the informal economy has become a persistent feature of the region's economic landscape and has been thriving, as documented by leading Caribbean scholars. Informal Commercial Importers in CARICOM is the first book to examine the various dimensions of informal commercial importing from an aggregate CARICOM perspective, emphasizing the economic dimensions and providing three empirical surveys of informal commercial importing in Guyana, Dominica and Jamaica. Roger Hosein and Martin Franklin provide a rich survey of the literature on shuttle trading, which aids in contextualizing the range of factors that has given rise to shuttle trading in CARICOM and enabled its longevity. They discuss the possible effects of formalizing the informal trade in CARICOM economies and propose strategies that can aid in this formalization process.While this book is written to appeal to an academic audience, it also provides essential reading for policymakers, research scholars and practitioners alike, and it provides a foundation for further studies of the shuttle trade in a changing Caribbean.

Analyzes informality in Latin America, exploring root causes and reasons for and implications of its growth. This book uses two distinct but complementary lenses. It concludes that reducing informality levels and overcoming the "culture of informality" will require actions to increase aggregate productivity in the economy.

This publication provides, for the first time, direct measures of informal employment inside and outside informal enterprises for 47 countries. It also presents statistics on the composition and contribution of the informal economy as well as on specific groups of urban informal workers.

Law and Employment analyzes the effects of regulation and deregulation on Latin American labor markets and presents empirically grounded studies of the costs of regulation. Numerous labor regulations that were introduced or reformed in Latin America in the past thirty years have had important economic consequences. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Carmen Pagés document the behavior of firms attempting to stay in business and be competitive while facing the high costs of complying with these labor laws. They challenge the prevailing view that labor market regulations affect only the distribution of labor incomes and have little or no impact on efficiency or the performance of labor markets. Using new micro-evidence, this volume shows that labor regulations reduce labor market turnover rates and flexibility, promote inequality, and discriminate against marginal workers. Along with in-depth studies of Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Trinidad, Law and Employment provides comparative analysis of Latin American economies against a range of European countries and the United States. The book breaks new ground by quantifying not only the cost of regulation in Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the OECD, but also the broader impact of this regulation.

High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy is an ethnography of globalization positioned at the intersection between political economy and cultural studies. Carla Freeman’s fieldwork in Barbados grounds the processes of transnational capitalism—production, consumption, and the crafting of modern identities—in the lives of Afro-Caribbean women working in a new high-tech industry called “informatics.” It places gender at the center of transnational analysis, and local Caribbean culture and history at the center of global studies. Freeman examines the expansion of the global assembly line into the realm of computer-based work, and focuses specifically on the incorporation of young Barbadian women into these high-tech informatics jobs. As such, Caribbean women are seen as integral not simply to the workings of globalization but as helping to shape its very form. Through the enactment of “professionalism” in both appearances and labor practices, and by insisting that motherhood and work go hand in hand, they re-define the companies’ profile of “ideal” workers and create their own “pink-collar” identities. Through new modes of dress and imagemaking, the informatics workers seek to distinguish themselves from factory workers, and to achieve these new modes of consumption, they engage in a wide array of extra income earning activities. Freeman argues that for the new Barbadian pink-collar workers, the globalization of production cannot be viewed apart from the globalization of consumption. In doing so, she shows the connections between formal and informal economies, and challenges long-standing oppositions between first world consumers and third world producers, as well as white-collar and blue-collar labor. Written in a style that allows the voices of the pink-collar workers to demonstrate the simultaneous burdens and pleasures of their work, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy will appeal to scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, women’s studies, political economy, and Caribbean studies, as well as labor and postcolonial studies.