Two essays on informality

Abstract

The first part of this study intends to give a detailed account on the recent literature of economics of informality. In particular, we focus on effects and determinants of informality as well as measurement of informal activity. We present both theoretical and empirical papers that employ a variety of methods to study informality. In the second part of the paper we ask whether informal economy acts as a barrier to growth of GDP per-capita. This has been a contentious subject in the literature. Cross-country panel regressions for the period between 1960 and 2012 including 160 countries provide evidence for a robust negative relationship between size of informal economy and relative per capita income. Building on this evidence we simulate a simple two-sector (formal and informal) dynamic general equilibrium model and show that under the presence of an informal sector a larger fraction of the observed per capita income differences across countries can be accounted for.