Publication: Is Informality Good for Business? The Impacts of IDP Inflows on Formal Firms
Loading...
Files in English
371 downloads
Date
2019-10
ISSN
Published
2019-10
Author(s)
Rozo, Sandra
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper examines the effects of large inflows of internally displaced persons (IDP), who are primarily absorbed by the informal sector, on the behavior of formal manufacturing firms in Colombia. To identify causal effects, the analysis employs annual, firm-level panel data between 1995 and 2010 and exploits that when conflict intensifies, forcefully displaced individuals tend to migrate to municipalities where people from their origin locations settled earlier. The paper finds that large inflows of IDP induce sizable, negative effects on the intensive and extensive margins of production of formal firms. These effects are stronger for firms operating in sectors that face a stronger competition from the informal economy.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Rozo, Sandra; Winkler, Hernan. 2019. Is Informality Good for Business? The Impacts of IDP Inflows on Formal Firms. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9035. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32519 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Future of Poverty(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15)Climate change is increasingly acknowledged as a critical issue with far-reaching socioeconomic implications that extend well beyond environmental concerns. Among the most pressing challenges is its impact on global poverty. This paper projects the potential impacts of unmitigated climate change on global poverty rates between 2023 and 2050. Building on a study that provided a detailed analysis of how temperature changes affect economic productivity, this paper integrates those findings with binned data from 217 countries, sourced from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform. By simulating poverty rates and the number of poor under two climate change scenarios, the paper uncovers some alarming trends. One of the primary findings is that the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide could be nearly doubled due to climate change. In all scenarios, Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to bear the brunt, contributing the largest number of poor people, with estimates ranging between 40.5 million and 73.5 million by 2050. Another significant finding is the disproportionate impact of inequality on poverty. Even small increases in inequality can lead to substantial rises in poverty levels. For instance, if every country’s Gini coefficient increases by just 1 percent between 2022 and 2050, an additional 8.8 million people could be pushed below the international poverty line by 2050. In a more extreme scenario, where every country’s Gini coefficient increases by 10 percent between 2022 and 2050, the number of people falling into poverty could rise by an additional 148.8 million relative to the baseline scenario. These findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive climate policies that not only mitigate environmental impacts but also address socioeconomic vulnerabilities.Publication Central Bank Independence and Sovereign Borrowing(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-25)This paper studies the impact of central bank independence on sovereign borrowing, using an index that captures institutional constraints on central bank lending to the government across 155 countries from 1972 to 2023. The findings show that tighter lending to the executive significantly reduces sovereign interest rates and raises the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio in developing countries. These effects reflect the executive’s improved ability to borrow at lower costs under greater central bank independence. The results are robust to multiple tests, but there are no significant effects in advanced economies. From a policy perspective, the results highlight the key role of independent central banks as catalysts for reducing governments’ borrowing costs and enhancing the government’s borrowing capacity.Publication Disentangling the Key Economic Channels through Which Infrastructure Affects Jobs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03)This paper takes stock of the literature on infrastructure and jobs published since the early 2000s, using a conceptual framework to identify the key channels through which different types of infrastructure impact jobs. Where relevant, it highlights the different approaches and findings in the cases of energy, digital, and transport infrastructure. Overall, the literature review provides strong evidence of infrastructure’s positive impact on employment, particularly for women. In the case of electricity, this impact arises from freeing time that would otherwise be spent on household tasks. Similarly, digital infrastructure, particularly mobile phone coverage, has demonstrated positive labor market effects, often driven by private sector investments rather than large public expenditures, which are typically required for other large-scale infrastructure projects. The evidence on structural transformation is also positive, with some notable exceptions, such as studies that find no significant impact on structural transformation in rural India in the cases of electricity and roads. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities, due to the absence of agglomeration economies and complementary inputs such as human capital. Accordingly, reducing transport costs alone may not be sufficient to drive economic transformation in rural areas. The spatial dimension of transformation is particularly relevant for transport, both internationally—by enhancing trade integration—and within countries, where economic development tends to drive firms and jobs toward urban centers, benefitting from economies scale and network effects. Turning to organizational transformation, evidence on skill bias in developing countries is more mixed than in developed countries and may vary considerably by context. Further research, especially on the possible reasons explaining the differences between developed and developing economies, is needed.Publication Crowding Out and Banking Crises(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-22)This paper studies the effect of government issuance on firm issuance during banking crises using transaction-level bond and loan data from 66 countries between 1991 and 2017. Governments rarely issue loans, preferring to issue in bond markets. In contrast, firms receive most of their financing from banks. During banking crises, as the supply of domestic loans decreases, firms switch to issuing bonds in domestic markets. The paper uses a novel instrument based on maturing debt to overcome the potential endogeneity of government issuance. The findings show that firms must compete with the government for funds in the domestic bond market and are crowded out from this market as a result. This happens not only in developing countries, but in advanced countries as well. The paper also shows that firms with the ability to tap international debt markets switch to these markets when crowding out occurs in domestic bond markets. Lastly, the paper shows that more developed domestic bond markets mitigate, but do not eliminate, the degree to which crowding out occurs.Publication Designing and Analyzing Powerful Experiments(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-22)This paper offers practical advice on how to improve statistical power in randomized experiments through choices and actions researchers can take at the design, implementation, and analysis stages. At the design stage, the choice of estimand, choice of treatment, and decisions that affect the residual variance and intra-cluster correlation can all affect power for a given sample size. At the implementation stage, researchers can boost power through increasing compliance with treatment, reducing attrition, and improving outcome measurement. At the analysis stage, power can be increased through using different test statistics or estimands, through the choice of control variables, and through incorporating informative priors in a Bayesian analysis. A key message is that it does not make sense to talk of “the” power of an experiment. A study can be well-powered for one outcome or estimand, but not others, and a fixed sample size can yield very different levels of power depending on researcher decisions.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication The Unintended Consequences of Deportations(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-01)Can repatriation inflows impact firm behavior in origin countries? This paper examines this question in the context of repatriation inflows from the United States and Mexico to El Salvador. The paper combines a rich longitudinal data set covering all formal firms in El Salvador with individual-level data on all registered repatriations from 2010 to 2017. The empirical strategy combines variation in the municipality of birth of individuals repatriated over 1995-2002—before a significant change in deportation policies—with annual variation in aggregate inflows of repatriations to El Salvador. The findings show that repatriations have large negative effects on the average wages of formal workers. This is mainly driven by formal firms in sectors that face more intense competition from the informal sector, which deportees are more likely to join. Repatriation inflows also reduce total employment among formal firms in those sectors. Given that most deportees spend less than a month abroad, these findings suggest that the experience of being detained and deported can have strong negative effects not only on the deportees, but also on their receiving communities.Publication Informality among Formal Firms : Firm-level, Cross-country Evidence on tax Compliance and Access to Credit(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-01-01)The authors use firm-level, cross-county data from Investment Climate surveys in 49 developing countries to investigate an important channel through which informality can affect productivity: access to credit and external finance. Informality is measured as self-reported lack of tax compliance in a sample of registered firms that also answered questions on a large set of other characteristics. The authors find that more tax compliance is significantly associated with more access to credit both in OLS and in country fixed effects estimates. In particular, the link between credit and formality is stronger in high-formality countries. This suggests that firms' balance sheets are relatively more informative for financial institutions in environments where signal extraction is a less noisy process. The authors' results are robust to the inclusion of a wide array of correlates and to two-stage estimation.Publication The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka(2012-03-01)The majority of firms in most developing countries are informal. The authors of this paper conducted a field experiment in Sri Lanka that provided incentives for informal firms to formalize. Offering only information about the registration process and reimbursement for direct registration costs had no impact on formalization. Adding payments equivalent to one-half to one month's profits for the median firm led to registration of around one-fifth of firms. A larger payment equivalent to two months' median profits induced half the firms to register. The main reasons for not formalizing when offered incentives included issues related to ownership of land and concerns about facing labor taxes in the future. The degree of bureaucracy in the registration process also seems to matter for those with the incentive to register, with response to the incentives higher in Colombo, where the registration process was easier, than in Kandy. Three follow-up surveys, at 15 to 31 months after the intervention, measure the impact of formalizing on these firms. Although mean profits increased, this appears largely due to the experiences of a few firms that grew rapidly, with most firms experiencing no increase in income as a result of formalizing. The authors also find little evidence for most of the channels through which formalization is hypothesized to benefit firms, although formalized firms do advertise more and are more likely to use receipt books. In qualitative interviews owners of formalized firms also feel their businesses have more legitimacy. Finally, formalizing is found to result in a large increase in trust in the state. Their focus is largely on the private costs and benefits of existing firms formalizing. Within their sample they cannot measure broader impacts of formalization on other firms (who may prosper from not having to compete against informal firms not paying taxes), nor impacts of easier formalization on entry of new firms. Nevertheless, our results suggest that although most informal firms do not want to formalize, given the current private costs and benefits of formalizing, policy efforts that lead to relatively modest increases in the net benefits of formalizing would induce a sizeable share of informal firms to formalize.Publication Informal Economy and the World Bank(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-05)Many countries have expressed an interest in the size, performance and motivation of the informal sector, especially where the informal sector provides the livelihood and employment for a critical segment of the population. This essay reviews recent literature, methodologies, and relevant Bank studies as a way to share information with country teams interested in expanding their knowledge of the informal sector and related policy debates. Research in a number of regions points to four main areas where development policy can be improved by taking the informal sector into account. First, improvements should be made along a continuum; the heterogeneity among informal firms points to different policy approaches for different types of firms. Second, there should be public-private collaboration on mutual reforms. Many efforts to improve firm performance focus on elements of the production function (labor skills, credit) while treating government mainly as a cost (taxes, cost of compliance with regulations). Yet research reveals that many characteristics of the public regime strongly influence the decisions of firms regarding informality. Third, research indicates a strong relation between basic skills and labor outcomes, particularly in the informal sector, despite the sector's lower average returns. Research also indicates the benefits of targeted training programs. Business services programs have a decidedly mixed record, yet ongoing research is refining results on what works best. Fourth, informal trade is pervasive in developing countries and the networks developed in informal trade -- wholesalers, credit suppliers and money-changers, transporters -- are a strong presence in the informal sector. Yet these kinds of complex and nontransparent trading systems can be discouraging to foreign investors and can otherwise undermine trade policy and the international competitiveness of developing countries. The paper concludes with recommendations.Publication Is Better Information Always Good News? International Corporate Strategy and Regulation(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-10)This paper develops a simple model to analyze the interaction between strategic corporate public good provision, international firm location and national regulation. An information-based strategic corporate public good provision mechanism is proposed to shed light on recent firm behavior within different regulatory environments. The main insight derived is that in the presence of firms with geographic flexibility (multinational enterprises) and market provision of an international public credence good, unilateral (non-cooperative) regulatory scope depends on (1) the absolute probabilities to verify firms' corporate public good provision levels within different geographic and institutional environments, and (2) the differential between these probabilities across countries. The relative information asymmetry determines not only the market levels of the public good produced under autarky, but also the relocation incentives of multinational enterprises. A firm trades off lower production costs, which increase its competitiveness in pricing, with higher expected informational price premiums, which decrease its competitiveness. A government's ability to regulate above market (corporate public good provision) levels decreases with the absolute level of foreign transparency, while it increases in the relative (positive) difference between the same transparency at home and abroad. This may not only explain mixed empirical evidence of theoretic propositions such as the Pollution Haven Hypothesis and Regulatory Race to the Bottom dynamics, but also open up interesting policy implications as the international information playing field becomes leveled through development, while existing regulations are rather rigid, and policy coordination remains limited.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Lebanon Economic Monitor, Fall 2022(Washington, DC, 2022-11)The economy continues to contract, albeit at a somewhat slower pace. Public finances improved in 2021, but only because spending collapsed faster than revenue generation. Testament to the continued atrophy of Lebanon’s economy, the Lebanese Pound continues to depreciate sharply. The sharp deterioration in the currency continues to drive surging inflation, in triple digits since July 2020, impacting the poor and vulnerable the most. An unprecedented institutional vacuum will likely further delay any agreement on crisis resolution and much needed reforms; this includes prior actions as part of the April 2022 International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff-level agreement (SLA). Divergent views among key stakeholders on how to distribute the financial losses remains the main bottleneck for reaching an agreement on a comprehensive reform agenda. Lebanon needs to urgently adopt a domestic, equitable, and comprehensive solution that is predicated on: (i) addressing upfront the balance sheet impairments, (ii) restoring liquidity, and (iii) adhering to sound global practices of bail-in solutions based on a hierarchy of creditors (starting with banks’ shareholders) that protects small depositors.Publication Argentina Country Climate and Development Report(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)The Argentina Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) explores opportunities and identifies trade-offs for aligning Argentina’s growth and poverty reduction policies with its commitments on, and its ability to withstand, climate change. It assesses how the country can: reduce its vulnerability to climate shocks through targeted public and private investments and adequation of social protection. The report also shows how Argentina can seize the benefits of a global decarbonization path to sustain a more robust economic growth through further development of Argentina’s potential for renewable energy, energy efficiency actions, the lithium value chain, as well as climate-smart agriculture (and land use) options. Given Argentina’s context, this CCDR focuses on win-win policies and investments, which have large co-benefits or can contribute to raising the country’s growth while helping to adapt the economy, also considering how human capital actions can accompany a just transition.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication The Journey Ahead(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-31)The Journey Ahead: Supporting Successful Migration in Europe and Central Asia provides an in-depth analysis of international migration in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and the implications for policy making. By identifying challenges and opportunities associated with migration in the region, it aims to inform a more nuanced, evidencebased debate on the costs and benefits of cross-border mobility. Using data-driven insights and new analysis, the report shows that migration has been an engine of prosperity and has helped address some of ECA’s demographic and socioeconomic disparities. Yet, migration’s full economic potential remains untapped. The report identifies multiple barriers keeping migration from achieving its full potential. Crucially, it argues that policies in both origin and destination countries can help maximize the development impacts of migration and effectively manage the economic, social, and political costs. Drawing from a wide range of literature, country experiences, and novel analysis, The Journey Ahead presents actionable policy options to enhance the benefits of migration for destination and origin countries and migrants themselves. Some measures can be taken unilaterally by countries, whereas others require close bilateral or regional coordination. The recommendations are tailored to different types of migration— forced displacement as well as high-skilled and low-skilled economic migration—and from the perspectives of both sending and receiving countries. This report serves as a comprehensive resource for governments, development partners, and other stakeholders throughout Europe and Central Asia, where the richness and diversity of migration experiences provide valuable insights for policy makers in other regions of the world.Publication World Development Report 2006(Washington, DC, 2005)This year’s Word Development Report (WDR), the twenty-eighth, looks at the role of equity in the development process. It defines equity in terms of two basic principles. The first is equal opportunities: that a person’s chances in life should be determined by his or her talents and efforts, rather than by pre-determined circumstances such as race, gender, social or family background. The second principle is the avoidance of extreme deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels. This principle thus includes the objective of poverty reduction. The report’s main message is that, in the long run, the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of economic prosperity are complementary. In addition to detailed chapters exploring these and related issues, the Report contains selected data from the World Development Indicators 2005‹an appendix of economic and social data for over 200 countries. This Report offers practical insights for policymakers, executives, scholars, and all those with an interest in economic development.