SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/097380101200600202 The Informal Economy Worldwide: Trends and Characteristics

It has now been more than 40 years since the fi rst attempts of defi ning and data collection on informal sector and informal employment on a large scale were launched in the early 1970s. Many debates paved the way for the international defi nition of the informal sector in 1993 and informal employment in 2003. The informal economy is fi nally a means for conciliating the two concepts and since the mid-1970s, national estimates of size (employ-ment) and contribution (share of gross domestic product [GDP]) of the informal sector, and later on of the informal economy (and of its two major components: informal sector and employment outside the informal sector), have regularly been attempted and gathered on a large scale. This article is the most recent synthesis of these works. It is based on th