Informal Employment in Russia: Definitions, Incidence, Determinants and Labour Market Segmentation. OECD Economics Department Working Paper No. 1098, (2013).

摘要

This paper takes stock of informal employment in Russia analysing its incidence and determinants. Using the\udregular 2003-11 waves and an informality supplement of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) it\uddevelops several measures of informal employment and demonstrates that the incidence varies widely across the\uddifferent definitions. We also show that the determinants of informal employment are roughly stable across the\uddifferent measures: workers who are males, relatively young, unskilled and employed in construction and trade and\udrelated services have a higher likelihood to have an informal job. We also take a look at the issue of labour market\udsegmentation along the informal-formal divide by estimating an informal-formal wage gap at the means and across\udthe entire wage distributions. We find only weak evidence for labour market segmentation in Russia when estimating\udan informal-formal wage gap for salaried workers at the mean. The results of quantile regressions show a wage\udpenalty in the lower half of the distribution and no gap in the upper half for informal employees. In contrast, informal\udself-employed and entrepreneurs have conditional mean wages that are higher than the mean wages for the formally\udemployed. Across the entire wage distribution, however, we find a negative wage gap in the lowest quartile and a\udstrongly positive wage gap in the highest quartile, pointing to a segmented informal sector with a lower free entry tier\udand an upper rationed tier.