The Survey on Labour Informality and Informal Wages: Design, Structure and Research Potential

Roberto Dell'Anno, Lavinia Parisi and Zouhair Ennaoumi
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Roberto Dell'Anno: Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Salerno and CELPE
Lavinia Parisi: Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Salerno and CELPE
Zouhair Ennaoumi: Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Salerno and CELPE

No 181, CELPE Discussion Papers from CELPE - CEnter for Labor and Political Economics, University of Salerno, Italy

Abstract: This paper introduces the Survey on Labour Informality and Informal Wages (INSEAI), a harmonised cross-country microdata resource designed to measure forms of labour informality that are only imperfectly observed in conventional labour-force, income, and administrative data. Fielded online in 2025–2026 across thirteen countries, the questionnaire elicits status-specific information on employment protection and registration, social-security coverage, payment arrangements, discrepancies between actual and officially recorded wages, and secondary employment. We document the survey architecture, adaptive routing, sample construction, coding rules, and wage-harmonisation procedures, and we distinguish an author-constructed three-category measure of informality from a stricter ILO-oriented binary operationalisation. The paper also evaluates the realised sample composition and the age post-stratification used for the four largest country samples. The main contribution of INSEAI is to provide a common instrument with unusually detailed information on within-job formality and undeclared remuneration.

Keywords: Informality; Survey design; Country comparison; Informal wage; Envelope wage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57
Date: 2026
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