Informal employment in Kazakhstan: a blessing in disguise?

Altay Mussurov (), Dena Sholk and Reza (Gholamreza) Arabsheibani ()
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Altay Mussurov: KIMEP University
Dena Sholk: IHS Markit

Eurasian Economic Review, 2019, vol. 9, issue 2, No 6, 267-284

Abstract: Abstract Informality is heterogeneous, dynamic and difficult to quantify; the formal–informal gap in earnings is one major component of it that we wish to examine. Using the 2013 Kazakhstan Labor Force Survey, we analyze the returns that formal and informal workers receive for a given set of characteristics and also use a matching technique to decompose the gap. We observe that in Kazakhstan, there is a substantial earnings gap in favor of formal workers and that a quarter of the gap remains unexplained. Our study also highlights the importance of matching-based decomposition and distributional analysis in explaining the differences in earnings between formal and informal workers.

Keywords: Formal and informal sectors; Labor policy; Post transition economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J46 P52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s40822-018-0117-1

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