Determinants and poverty implications of informal sector work in Chile

I focus my analysis on a particular type of proliferating informal sector work. This work has potentially serious implications for workers' well-being: wage and salary work without a contract. In what follows, I refer to this form of employment as "wage and salary work in the informal sector" in the sense that it is undeclared to appropriate government authorities and, consequently, unregulated and untaxed. The article is organized as follows: Section II describes the sample and provides some characteristics of household head employment in wage and salary jobs in the informal sector in Chile at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The conceptual framework and methodology used to examine the determinants of household head employment in wage and salary jobs in the informal versus the formal sector and the welfare implications of lacking a work contract are presented in Section III. Section IV contains a discussion of the findings, and Section V concludes the study. © 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.