There are three sources of data for the measurement of informal employment and social protection: i) household surveys, ii) establishment surveys, iii) administrative rosters or registries.

 

The objective of the inventory is to focus on household surveys as potential and/ or source used to collect data on social protection and informal employment. Establishment surveys generally fail to cover the whole active occupied population, particularly the establishments or activities operating within households’ premises or in the streets. Administrative data from social funds, the usual source of information for social security and certain dimensions of health and safety are, in the context of this inventory, used for coverage comparisons with household surveys.

 

Four main categories of household surveys can be used for the purpose of measuring informal employment and social protection coverage:

 

i.      labour force surveys (LFS) are the most frequent and the most appropriate: they focus on the employment characteristics of the workers, including the characteristics of the enterprises in which they work, and on the characteristics of job-seekers, including the various means of job search. In many countries the labour force surveys have become regular and are carried out on a yearly, quarterly or even monthly basis.

ii.      living standard or living conditions surveys (LSS), integrated or priority surveys, including Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys, are often associated with income/expenditures or budget/consumption surveys. A general tendency across the developing countries has been for this type of surveys to become multi-purpose surveys, including a large section on employment so that in some countries, it takes the place of the labour force survey. Among the sections of these extended questionnaires, several can be used for the purpose of this manual: employment of the household members is the main one; health with the medical expenses for household members who have been sick during the past month (or the past two weeks) and who paid for them; the section on expenditures can provide the total amount of medical expenses during the year for all members of the household and their share in total expenditures; the section on income provides the sources of household income, and especially income from transfers (public and private: from household to household) in general and remittances in particular.

 iii.      mixed surveys (specially designed to measure informal sector employment and informal employment), which are combined household/enterprise surveys. The 1993 ICLS recommended the ‘mixed surveys’ to capture the informal sector. It consists in a household survey (on labour force or on income-expenditures) at the first stage allowing the identification of all informal sector enterprises (main as well as secondary) operated by the household members (own-account informal enterprises and informal employers’ enterprises); then in a second stage (which can be immediate) an establishment survey is carried out for each of these pre-identified economic units. The first mixed surveys have been launched prior to the 1993 ICLS: in Mali and Mexico in 1989, and in Tanzania in 1990 for example. Since then their number has considerably increased though not so much at national level: ENAMIN in Mexico belongs to this category, as well as the 1-2-3 surveys carried out by AFRISTAT in the capital cities of West Africa in the early 2000s.

iv.      Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), which constitute a unique corpus of standardised and harmonised surveys, have succeeded in the 1980s to the World Fertility Survey: their focus is on reproductive health, child health and family planning. Based on representative samples of households, the individual questionnaires are asked to women (and men) aged 15 to 49; consequently their results are not strictly comparable with other types of household surveys. Moreover, it is only with the last round of these surveys (2008) that questions on medical aid coverage were introduced in the individual questionnaires.

 v.      Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys (MICS) and Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire (CWIQ) surveys are shortened versions of living conditions and DHS surveys and focus on poverty predictors and subjective assessment of well-being. MICS surveys focus on woman’s and child’s health and questions on employment are basic ones (some of these surveys may contain a question on time spent in household chores. Although CWIQ surveys include a section on employment and a section on health, they revealed not to contain the appropriate questions for the measurement of informal employment and social protection.

 vi.      Time-use surveys (TUS) can include a section on employment, but this type of surveys has been included because it can provide information on time devoted to care for the children, the sick, the elderly and the handicapped, provided by household members to other household members, but also to other households. In this sense, it is a kind of social protection, which must be taken into account.

The sources for compilation of current practices were the websites of the national statistical offices, the list and the URL addresses are provide by the UN statistics division at: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/inter-natlinks/sd_natstat.asp.

 

However the national websites were first screened through the International Household Survey Network (IHSN)   a web-based Central Survey and Census Catalog, which provides users with access to selected survey and census metadata, documentation and datasets. Access to underlying electronic files is enforced and controlled according to each official depositor’s policy. Access to the website of National Statistical Offices is facilitated through IHSN and tabulations and metadata are more and more accessible on national websites.