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Share of non-agricultural employment which is classified as informal employment

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. Individuals may have to take up informal employment to ensure their livelihood. In these situations, indicators such as the unemployment rate would provide a very incomplete picture of the labour market situation, overlooking major deficits in the quality of employment. Statistics on informality are key to assessing the quality of employment in an economy and are relevant to developing and developed countries alike. 

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Percentage (%)

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).

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);

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.
   

To produce this indicator, employment statistics disaggregated by formal / informal employment and by economic activity (agriculture / industry / services) are needed.

This indicator is calculated by using the following formula:

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 measure the proportion of informal employment in non?agriculture employment

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.

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/.