Inlay

New in in the International Labour Review / @ilr-rit.bsky.social: "Measurement and mirage: The informal sector revisited" by Max Gallien: doi.org/10.16995/ilr... Also available in French, in Revue internationale du Travail 165 (2), and Spanish, in Revista Internacional del Trabajo 145 (2).

🎓 Congrats to Nobuyuki Nakamura & Aya Suzuki @utokyoofficial.bsky.social on presenting their ILR article at #PAA2026 in St. Louis! Forthcoming in Issue 2, 2026:📄 "Occupational credentials and migrants' return aspirations: Evidence from foreign elderly-care workers in Japan" 🔓 Read: bit.ly/3PjvlR2

Recent years have seen rapidly expanding scholarship and policy advice on the causes and consequences of informality, relying on the increasing availability of comparative measurements of informal sectors. This has created an impression of a consensus around a clearly conceptualized and quantified object of study – that when we talk about the informal sector, we know what we are talking about. In this article I argue that this impression is largely a mirage. I suggest that underneath increasingly accepted measurements, and actively masked by them, there remain both a fundamental conceptual confusion and substantial diversity in understandings of what the informal sector is. Questions of definition have been moved “downstream” into the specifications of statistical models and measurements, resulting in a lack of transparency and the emergence of feedback loops between common conceptions and methodological assumptions. This has led a large part of the current literature on informal sectors to generate potentially spurious insights that feed into substantive development policy discussions around taxation, registration and social protection. I review the causes and consequences of these issues, drawing on two measurement methods, recent policy reports and new survey data from Ghana, and suggests ways forward.

While temporary migrants, especially in labour-intensive industries, are expected to contribute to economic growth and the labour market in their host and home countries, the motives for their return to their home countries are ambiguous. In this study, we investigate the effects of occupational credentials, as proof of skills, on migrant behaviour – specifically, whether those held in migrants’ home and host countries influence their return aspirations – using primary data on foreign elderly-care workers in Japan. We find that migrant workers who hold occupational credentials in their home countries tend to expect to return to their home countries much sooner than those who do not. Our findings suggest that the occupational credentials issued in each country play a crucial role in migrant workers’ return.