Informal Workers in the Russian Economy: Who Are They and How Many?

Abstract

The paper discusses the evolution of the informal employment in the Russian labor market over the last decade. It uses all consecutive waves of the Labor Force Survey conducted by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service in 1999-2009. Looking inside the informality and tracing its evolution over time, we pay special attention to heterogeneity of the informal employment and distinguish salaried informal workers and informal self-employed as two major informal groups. Simple descriptive analysis is complemented by estimating marginal effects from multinomial logit regressions. Additionally, we use cross-section estimates of informality for all Russian regions for 1999-2009 and build a new hand-made panel database with regions as observations.