Regional Course on Statistics on Informality: Definitions, Measurement, SDG's and other Policy Indicators

The causes and consequences of informal employment and employment in informal sector and their impact on achieving sustainable development continues to gain attention in national development agendas. The evidence in developing and emerging economies shows that on average the proportions of people in informal employment ranges from close to two thirds in emerging economies to nearly 90% in low-income countries. Therefore, every national policy targeting poverty, social protection, or decent work needs to recognise the role of the informal economy in national development. Yet, the lack of data and statistics on the informal economy hinders the capacity of countries to better inform decisions and development policies. 

This regional training course brings together statisticians and labour analysts from Asia-Pacific national statistical systems to discuss technical aspects and share experiences in the production and use of statistics on informality with the objectives of: 

1) Assessing progress in the production of statistics on informal employment and employment in the informal sector in Asia and the Pacific Region, and major hindrances in data production;

 2) Providing technical information and illustrations of good practices on collecting and tabulating data on informal employment and employment in the informal sector aligned to the latest development in labour market standards, and categories of informal workers as well as related data needed for the preparation of SDG indicators; 

3) Promoting the collection of data and improvement of statistics on informal employment and employment in the informal sector as an integral part of national labour force statistics; and

 4) Providing guidance and illustrations of good practices on how to conduct diagnoses of informality and how to contextualize indicators to decide on priorities and inform policy development and monitoring.