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The Invisibility of Wage Employment in Statistics on the Informal Economy in Africa: Causes and Consequences

Rizzo, Matteo; Kilama, Blandina; Wuyts, Marc

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Authors

Blandina Kilama

Marc Wuyts



Abstract

This article challenges the claim, along with the statistics that support it, that self-employment is by far the dominant employment status in the informal economy. The article begins by reviewing key insights from relevant literature on the informal economy to argue that conventional notions of ‘wage employment’ and ‘self-employment’, while unfit for capturing the nature and variety of employment relations in developing countries, remain central to the design of surveys on the workforce therein. After putting statistics on Tanzania’s informal economy and labour force into context, the analysis reviews the type of wage employment relationships that can be found in one instance of the informal economy in urban Tanzania. The categories and terms used by workers to describe their employment situation are then contrasted with those used by the latest labour force survey in Tanzania. The article scrutinises how key employment categories have been translated from English into Swahili, how the translation biases respondents’ answers towards the term ‘self-employment’, and how this, in turn, leads to the statistical invisibility of wage labour in the informal economy. The article also looks at the consequences of this ‘statistical tragedy’ and at the dangers of conflating varied forms of employment, including wage labour, that differ markedly in their modes of operation and growth potential. Attention is also paid to the trade-offs faced by policy-makers in designing better labour force surveys.

Citation

Rizzo, M., Kilama, B., & Wuyts, M. (2014). The Invisibility of Wage Employment in Statistics on the Informal Economy in Africa: Causes and Consequences. The Journal of Development Studies, 51(2), 149-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2014.968136

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Oct 1, 2014
Deposit Date Apr 30, 2015
Publicly Available Date Sep 15, 2023
Print ISSN 0022-0388
Electronic ISSN 1743-9140
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 51
Issue 2
Pages 149-161
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2014.968136

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