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LAC Equity Lab: Informality Indicators

In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), labor informality and disparities in wage employment have persisted for decades, posing ongoing challenges across the region. Analyzing informality through both the productive definition and the social protection definition offers contrasting insights. Under the productive definition, LAC saw improvements, with informality rates declining between 2016 and 2024. However, under the social protection definition, informality among wage employees increased during the same period. These diverging trends highlight a complex reality: although salaried employment expanded, many of these jobs lacked access to formal benefits.

This dashboard enables users to explore both definitions of informality across LAC countries, disaggregated by sex. It also provides insights into wage employment, showing the share of 15+ workers engaged in wage employment as a percentage of the total population and the working population, also disaggregated by sex.


Key concept definitions:

Informality – Productive definition: Productivity–based informality is the employment share of unpaid family workers, unskilled self-employment, and salaried workers in small firms.

Informality – Social protection definition: social protection-based informality captures salaried employees without employer-provided pension or health insurance benefits, as share of salaried employment.

Wage Employment: wage employment is the share of salaried employees in total employment.

The Labor Database for Latin America and the Caribbean - LABLAC (CEDLAS and the World Bank) is a harmonization project that seeks to mitigate differences arising from country-specific survey design and thus foment comparable indicators between LAC countries. However, methodological changes in the underlying surveys may result in non-comparable data that the harmonization process cannot fully solve. It is important that the user knows what data is and is not comparable. For more information, visit the LABLAC: comparability dashboard.

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