The Economics of Informality Conference 2018

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https://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/18478

The conference will be the first organized by the “Network on Informality Studies” at Universidad del Rosario.
The school of Economics at Universidad del Rosario (Bogota, Colombia) is pleased to invite you to The Economics of Informality Conference 2018. This Conference aims to bring together scholars, experts, young researchers, practitioners and policy makers to present their work and exchange knowledge and debate the issues about informal economy.


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Examinando The Economics of Informality Conference 2018 por Materia "Microempresas"

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    Bank Account Ownership by Micro-entrepreneurs in Mexico
    (2018-05-28) Rodríguez Zamora, Carolina; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    This paper evaluates the impact of a VAT rate increase on bank account ownershipby Mexican micro-entrepreneurs considering informality as the main channel of this effect. Using two rounds of a cross-section survey aimed at understanding financial inclusion in Mexicoand a difference-in-difference strategy, results indicate that an increase in the VAT rate negatively affects the probability of having a bank account by micro-entrepreneurs in northern municipalities where the tax rate increased from 11 to 16 percent. In particular, financial inclusion of micro-entrepreneurs in the northern border decreased and the effect is statistically significant,whereas financial inclusion of formal and informal salaried workersin the northern borderdid not change as their fiscal obligations remained the same with the VAT amendment.
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    Differences in efficiency between formal and informal micro-firms in Mexico
    (2018-05-28) Báez-Morales, Antonio; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    Micro firmscan be seen as potential growth drivers, as they are usually related to entrepreneurship, a relatively high share of micro firms can also be a sign of an underdeveloped productive system.Unlike other studies, this researchseparates formal and informal micro firms in order to test whether there are efficiency differences between them, and to explain these differences. One of the novelties of the study is the use of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method. The empirical evidence suggests that output and efficiency differences are not only explained by endowment characteristics but also by endowment returns
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    How vulnerable are the self-employed? Evidence from Uganda
    (2018-05-28) Lakemann, Tabea; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    Due to small firm sizes and inter-linkages between household and business finances, small-scale entrepreneurs in developing countries are inherently vulnerable to temporary and per-manent income shortfalls, and hence household poverty. While the ILO generally defines self-employment without employees as vulnerable employment, little empirical research has beendone on the extent to which the self-employed are indeed vulnerable. This paper makes twomain contributions: first, it operationalises the concept of vulnerability in the context of self-employment in developing countries by defining vulnerability as the risk of having businessincome below a living wage threshold. Secondly, it investigates the extent and correlates ofvulnerability. Using a balanced entrepreneur panel dataset from Kampala, Uganda, it is shownthat the self-employed are heterogeneous with respect to vulnerability and observed earnings:while close to 70% of the sample are vulnerable and mostly earn incomes below the threshold,about 30% are non-vulnerable and mostly earn incomes above the living wage. Vulnerable en-trepreneurs are shown to be significantly different from non-vulnerable entrepreneurs in severaldimensions, including those that do not directly predict income.
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    The Informal sector and economic transformation in India
    (2018-05-28) Kesar, Surbhi; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    In the literature on development and modernization, it has been expected that with economic growth and a consequent increase in per capita income, the dualism between the formal and informal economic sectors will wither away, leading to a structural transformation and formalization of the economy. However, in India, in spite of a long period of sustained economic growth, the informal sector has continued to persist and to provide employment to a vast majority of the population. The interaction of informal economy with the process of economic growth has been widely debated in the literature from two competing perspectives – (i) the segmentation / dualist views, which sees the informal economy as a residual sector that absorbs the excess labour force in the economy. This view supports the ‘need’ for a transition towards a full-fledged formal/ ‘modern’ economy as the ideal path of development (Ranis and Stewart, 1999; Mandelman and Montes-Rojas, 2009; La Porta and Shleifer, 2014); and (ii) the micro-entrepreneurial view, which sees the informal economy as dynamic in nature, with risk taking and profit-maximizing enterprises that can act as the engines of economic growth. This strand views the self-employment in informal sector as the seedbed for modern capitalism in the Third World countries, thereby implicitly arguing that the issue of transformation is already resolved (De Soto, 1989; Fajnzylber et al, 2006). It has been further argued that the informal economy might be the preferred destination for the workforce than being employed as formal salaried workers (Maloney, 2004). On the other hand, there has been a concern that has also been raised about a possible stalling of the transformation process across developing economies (Timmer & Akkus, 2008; DeVries et al, 2012). Specifically, in the Indian context, some recent works have argued that the growth process has been largely exclusionary, leaving out a major part of the workforce outside the dynamics of transformation (Sanyal, 2007; Bhaduri, 2017), while it has also been argued that if the growth process can be made more inclusive, it would eventually lead to a large scale transformation of the Indian economy (Bardhan, 2009).