Abstract

Interest in the informal economy continues to attract considerable attention. New informal types of economic activities are emerging, creating new types of jobs that could be characterized as being less formal or even informal in nature. Informal production activities provide employment and income to many people who might otherwise be unemployed. These are often associated with lower and uncertain income for workers since informal workers and enterprises are less protected against negative economic shocks. This may have broader consequences for inequality and poverty. The quantification of the informal economy and data on its characteristics are needed for designing, implementing, monitoring, and analysing macro-economic and social policies and to assess their impact.
An important contribution of the System of National Accounts , 2008 (2008 SNA) was establishing the connection between the work on the informal sector, the informal economy, and their integration in the national accounts. However, neither the 2008 SNA nor the International Labour Organisation (ILO) resolutions provide statistical recommendations or a comprehensive framework for the informal economy.
At its fifty-first session, the United Nations Statistical Commission initiated the updating of the 2008 SNA for adoption in 2025. The update of the 2008 SNA considers an increased focus of household production as part of its work to better reflect wellbeing issues in the SNA and other supplementary presentations. Moreover, the ILO Working Group for the Revision of the standards of statistics on informality has made substantial progress in developing a comprehensive set of statistics on the informal economy. These two initiatives created a unique opportunity to align the SNA and ILO standards on labour in general and the informal economy in particular.
For the update of the macroeconomic standards a Statistical Framework for the Informal Economy was developed which aims to 1) present recommendations for a coherent set of statistical recommendations necessary for measurement of work and economic activity in the informal economy, and 2) identify and delineate the statistical issues on the informal economy that should be addressed.
The overarching concept of the informal economy is defined as constituting all informal productive activities carried out by workers or economic units within the general production boundary. The statistical framework on informality, focuses on the perspective of the economic unit and its relation to informal productive activities and the informal economy. This comprises a decision tree to identify informal productive activities, scope of the informal economy and a coherent set of statistical concepts and definitions relating to the informal economy across all statistical domains in particular, national accounts, external sector statistics, and labour statistics.