Who are the workers of the informal economy? The informal economy is far from homogeneous and covers an extremely wide range of demographic realities and situations. Individual characteristics such as gender, living in rural or urban areas, age and education strongly interact and shape the frontier between the informal and formal economies.
Although the demographic characteristics of informal workers vary greatly across countries, a number of common trends emerge:
- On average, globally, there are more men than women in informal employment. But there are more countries in which women’s informal employment rate is higher than for men. Women’s informal work is often concentrated in less visible and less protected activities such as domestic work, unpaid family labour and small-scale trade.
- Informality remains more common in rural areas where informal agricultural activities dominate.
- Younger workers who struggle to enter the job market because of lack of qualifications or experience may face higher risks of informal employment. At the same time, older informal workers who lack access to pension schemes may have to continue working until an advanced age.
- Workers with low educational attainment are far more likely to work informally.