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This indicator presents the share of non-agricultural employment which is classified as informal employment). (International Labour Organization)

Employment comprises all persons of working age who during a specified brief period, such as one week or one day, performed work for others in exchange for pay or profit. Employment is considered informal if the employment relationship is not lawful or in practice, subject to labour legislation, income tax, social protection or employment benefits. The informal employment status is determined by the informal sector nature of the enterprise. Informal enterprises are those that are unincorporated, the owner sells some of the goods/services it produces, and the enterprise is not registered. Informal employment in non-agricultural employment, therefore, are jobs at informal enterprises.

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Annual

Percentage (%)

Informal employment is categorized based on the job and is defined with respect to the employment relationship and protections associated with the job of the worker. According to the international standards adopted by the 15th ICLS, the informal sector consists of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned. The informal sector is a subset of unincorporated enterprises not constituted as separate legal entities independently of their owners (ILO, 1993).

Employment comprises all persons of working age who during a specified brief period, such as one week or one day, performed work for others in exchange for pay or profit. Informal employment comprises persons who in their main or secondary jobs were in one of the following categories: - Own-account workers, employers and members of producers’ cooperatives employed in their own informal sector enterprises (the characteristics of the enterprise determine the informal nature of their jobs); - Own-account workers engaged in the production of goods exclusively for own final use by their household (e.g. subsistence farming); - Contributing family workers, regardless of whether they work in formal or informal sector enterprises (they usually do not have explicit, written contracts of employment, and are not subject to labour legislation, social security regulations, collective agreements, etc., which determines the informal nature of their jobs); - Employees holding informal jobs, whether employed by formal sector enterprises, informal sector enterprises, or as paid domestic workers by households (employees are considered to have informal jobs if their employment relationship is, in law or in practice, not subject to national labour legislation, income taxation, social protection or entitlement to certain employment benefits). An enterprise belongs to the informal sector if it fulfils the three following conditions: - It is an unincorporated enterprise (it is not constituted as a legal entity separate from its owners, and it is owned and controlled by one or more members of one or more households, and it is not a quasi-corporation: it does not have a complete set of accounts, including balance sheets); - It is a market enterprise (it sells at least some of the goods or services it produces); - The enterprise is not registered or the employees of the enterprise are not registered or the number of persons engaged on a continuous basis is below a threshold determined by the country.

Data on this indicator is requested disaggregated by sex. In order to produce this indicator, employment statistics disaggregated by formal/informal employment and by economic activity (agriculture/industry / services) are needed.

Proportion of informal employment in non-agricultural employment = (Informal employment in non-agricultural activities/Total employment in non-agricultural activities) × 100

This indicator can be used to determine the contribution of workers to the economy and policy-makers as it relates to protecting workers and improving working conditions.

The considerable heterogeneity of definitions and operational criteria used by countries to measure informal employment greatly hinders the international comparability of statistics on informality. Also, the scope of this indicator is limited to non-agriculture. However, to have a comprehensive picture of the importance of informality in the economy and to better understand its patterns, statistics on informal employment should be produced and analysed for both agricultural and non-agricultural activities

The data is collected using the labour force survey. All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.