Informal Economy Data Explorer

The informal economy absorbs 8 out of every 10 enterprises in the world. More than 60 percent of the world’s employed population, that is 2 billion people earn their livelihoods in the informal economy. The emergence of non-standard forms of employment, including through the rise in digital labor platforms, is also pushing the boundaries of the informal economy around the globe. The COVID-19 crisis has amply exposed the vulnerabilities of the informal economy, highlighting the need for enhanced, gender-responsive policy efforts to both protect and empower informal workers and enterprises while facilitating their gradual transitions to formality to foster job creation and decent work, avoid a deepening of poverty and inequality and build forward better.

Drawing on data from UNDP’s Data Futures Platform, ILO, and the World Bank, the Informal Economy Data Explorer includes and helps visualize a wide range of data on the informal economy (workers and enterprises). It supports comparative cross-country research on the informal economy and allows to investigate relationships between informal economy indicators, poverty, inequality, gender, governance, technology other key development indicators