Understanding Informality : Comprehensive Business-Level Data and Descriptive Findings

This paper introduces and provides a descriptive analysis of data from more than 15,000 detailed interviews of representative samples of informal businesses operating in 24 cities across seven countries, namely, India, Iraq, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Mozambique, Somalia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The paper is a companion paper to a study that presents the methodological underpinnings of the informal business data collection. It is an innovative application of area-based adaptive cluster sampling, rendering a representative sample of these businesses. The paper presents salient descriptive results of the data to motivate further research. The World Bank's Enterprise Analysis unit started collecting data from the informal sector using the adaptive cluster sampling method in 2017. The combined and standardized data show that informal businesses are small, young, mostly started out of necessity rather than as an opportunity for growth, largely detached from the rest of the economy, and with meager earnings. Few of the informal businesses have ever considered registering formally, with the majority perceiving no benefits from doing so.