The urban informal economy is understood normally as economic activities that are socially accepted and are generally for the survival of families though they are fully or partly outside the control of public administration in terms of taxes, legislation and statistics. Much of the information about the numbers of people in the informal economy comes from data collected in the 1990s. It is suspected that the informal economy was growing very rapidly during the 1990s. The comparison between the figures of Adauta (1998) and Assunção (2006) suggests that this was the case. (Adauta is referring to 1995, Assunção is referring to 2000 and 2001.) However the definitions are not exactly the same, and the latest figures are now at least 6 years old (in a period when the country was still at war).
Information about how many people are involved in the informal economy (or dependent on it for their livelihood) can only be obtained by large-scale household employment and income-expenditure surveys. There is a possibility that such a survey will be carried out by INE (the National Statistics’ Institute), with funding from UNICEF and/or the World Bank, within the next year. It will be important to try to ensure that this exercise does provide useful information and that it avoids some of the pitfalls of previous exercises of this type in Angola.
DW Angola
Development Workshop Angola