Informality remains widespread in labour markets around the world, contributing to poorer employment conditions, and restricting workers’ access to social protection, income security, public services and broader opportunities for economic inclusion. In response, the global formalisation agenda seeks to integrate informal workers and enterprises into formal legal and social protection systems, with the aim of improving job quality, extending rights, and fostering more inclusive economic development.
As policy makers strive to advance that agenda, in pursuit of Sustainable Development Goals 1.3 and 8.3, they need more reliable, comparable and policy-relevant data. In particular, without a good understanding of the individual situation of informal workers and the context of their households, they cannot adequately monitor progress on formalisation: that evidence is essential to develop effective social protection extension strategies, tackle the vulnerability challenge of informal workers, or support domestic resource mobilisation efforts.
In that context, the OECD is launching its updated Key Indicators of Informality based on Individuals and their Households (KIIbIH 2.0) database, expanding country and time coverage, and migrating it on to a new, user-friendlier OECD data portal. KIIbIH 2.0 builds upon household surveys to provide comparable indicators and harmonised data on informal employment, the well-being of informal workers and their dependents in 79 countries across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
It enables users to examine informality from both an individual and household perspective, offering a richer understanding of workers’ vulnerabilities, household dependency patterns, and the wider socio-economic context in which informal employment takes place. The updated database complements other harmonized datasets, based on different surveys (establishments surveys, labour force surveys), enabling a better diagnosis of the effects of informality on people’s and families’ livelihoods.
Combining technical insights with policy perspectives, this webinar will present the new features of the KIIbIH 2.0 database, and how they will help policy makers better address the multiple challenges of informality.