Informal Work in Numbers

Abstract

Chapter 3 introduces survey data from around the world and establishes broad trends in informal work and civil society participation. Descriptive statistics show that informal workers organize in nearly every country in the sample and extensively organize in many. I estimate a data set of informal workers using survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and a machine learning algorithm. Regressions on the estimated data set, a data set of known informal workers, and a data set of self-employed workers suggest that informal workers are more likely to organize in low-capacity countries. The chapter then turns to survey data from the 42 countries around the world in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) database and find similar patterns between informal work, state capacity, and political participation. The quantitative analyses point to cases to examine in more depth. Two cities in the La Paz department of Bolivia, La Paz and El Alto were selected, to see how informal workers interact with officials with lower enforcement capacity, as well as two districts in São Paulo, Brazil, to understand how informal workers interact with officials with higher enforcement capacity.