A Review of Informal Employment Research

With the development of the economy and society, employment forms have shown a trend of diversification. Informal employment has become an important form of employment, and governments have introduced policies to protect the rights of informal workers. This paper reviews the literature on informal employment and summarizes the definition, role, and impact of informal employment, governance, rural informal employment, and women’s power in informal employment. The study concludes that the impact of informal employment is twofold. On the one hand, informal employment provides employment opportunities and contributes to economic growth. On the other hand, the wages, working environment, and institutional security of informal workers are inferior to those of formal workers. In addition, most studies have focused on urban spaces, and there are fewer studies on rural informal employment, especially for rural women. Due to gender, education level, and family care, informal employment has become the main employment form of the rural female labor force, and it is particularly important to study their employment status and rights protection.

Human capital, Social Capital and the Informal Employment of Floating Population

The informal employment is an important part of the floating population employment in our country. Based on the survey data of seven cities in the year of 2013 of our country, by establishing Probit regression model this paper analysis the relationship among human capital, social capital and floating population informal employment empirically. The main conclusions are the following two points： in the factors of human capital the floating people who have professional certificate, possessed good health and a higher education level will have a lower probability of engaging in informal employment; in the factors of human capital, the higher the probability of associate with the local people, the higher the probability that the floating population is engaged in informal employment. But the floating population have a lower probability of engaging in informal employment if he（she） got help from organization, be discriminated against by the local people and have a sense of U＇ust in the government of the place where he（she） was engaged. At the end of this paper, the corresponding policy recommendations arc put forward.

SPECIAL ISSUE： MIGRANT WORKERS IN THE COURSE OF URBANIZATION Migrant workers and informal employment

On the basis of an analysis of data collected through questionnaire surveys of migrant workers informally employed in Guangzhou or working in enterprises in the Pearl River Delta, the present paper suggests that： firstly, migrant workers as a whole are found in a ~ow-level labor market that is segmented and relatively segregated; its internal balance between demand and supply is realized, however, by following a principle of laissez-faire. Secondly, that market has further evolved into formal employment inside formal enterprises and informal employment outside of it, with the latter coveting the two types of self-employment and employment. Thirdly, owing to the rather difficult state of existence of those formally employed in enterprises, as well as to the ongoing reproduction of that kind of state of existence, migrant workers tend to join the informal branch in the split between formal and informal employment. Fourthly, while the work of those migrant workers in informal employment can only serve to eke out a miserable survival, those who are self-employed have a chance for gradual accumulation and upward movement, and so the hope for a certain development.

Effects of Minimum Wage Hikes on the Formalization of Employment

Despite the intention of minimum wage policy to maintain the living standards of low-income groups in the formal sector, this paper has found that the actual result of this policy produces the ＂big push＂ impact on China＇s economy under certain conditions, i.e. it is conducive to achieving the equilibrium of high wage, high consumption and formalization. The result shows that the elasticity of income growth from raising the minimum wage standard is greater for formal sector employees than for informal sector employees and is characterized by a U-shaped pattern in terms of quantiles. Thus, minimum wage hikes have widened wage gaps between and within sectors. Rising minimum wage standards greatly stimulate consumption with each 10% increase expected to bring about an additional urban household consumption of about 1.167 billion yuan in the surveyed four provinces. With local minimum wage hikes, the formal sector of wholesale and retail, hotel and catering services expands and the informal sector contracts, while the real estate sector experiences a ＂reverse formalization＂ trend. Based on the ＂big push theory＂, this paper concludes that against the backdrop of extensive, frequent and substantial minimum wage hikes, demand and sector TFP growth are the major causes of sector heterogeneity.