Relationship between economic activity and development potential

• planning and estimations;
• agricultural policies;
• policies affecting informal sector
• research: e.g., study of savings and consumption patterns, household dynamics
• time poverty issues
• Policy benefits: good data leads to better policy

Sectors affecting women

• Subsistence-we've talked a bit about this one …
• Domestic-labor within the household, unpaid
• Volunteer-rotating labor associations, RoSCAs-what's the difference between volunteering for a charity and making a financial donation?
• Informal

What is the informal sector?

• Unregistered with tax authorities (don't pay taxes)
• self-employment
• ease of entry
• scale
• labor-intensive
• access issues (market, credit, labor)

Where things get counted makes a difference

The same jobs can be done, for instance cooking, sewing, cleaning:

• for pay in the formal sector,
• irregularly in the informal sector for pay, and
• in the domestic sector for no pay,
• How we measure economic activity affects size of economy

Factors influencing participation

• gender
• formal education
• age
• ethnicity

Why is this important?

• growing fast
• gendered
• safety valve for many on margins
• unregulated, insecure
• less visible