WIEGO STATISTICS PROGRAM: A BRIEF HISTORY

The WIEGO Statistics Programme has worked toward :

1) developing statistics on the informal economy as an essential component of mainstream or official statistics at national, regional and international levels; and

2) ensuring that policy makers, researchers and advocates will have access to statistics that will be useful in their work.

From the beginning, this programme has worked closely with both producers and users of official statistics. This collaboration is a major strength of the programme and is therefore reflected in the composition of this advisory group.

The first meeting of an informal WIEGO advisory group on statistics took place in New York at UNIFEM in October 1997, shortly after the launching of WIEGO. WIEGO organized this meeting with the United Nations Statistics Division. A result of the meeting was the preparation of five papers for presentation by the authors at the second meeting of the Delhi Group on Informal Sector Statistics in Ankara, Turkey in April 1998. The topics covered were: a data compilation and methods on women working in the informal sector and on street vendors in Africa; concepts and classification to improve statistics on home-based workers and the informal sector and an analysis of data on homeworkers in Mexico.

Additional informal advisory meetings on statistics took place in connection with WIEGO General Meetings, specifically in Ottawa in April 1999, in Boston at Harvard in 2000 and in Ahmedabad in 2002. Another informal advisory meeting took place in New York in May 2001 to take advantage of WIEGO participation at a seminar on data on women and work convened at the Rockefeller Foundation. The WIEGO meeting discussed a framework and strategy for the development of global, regional and national estimates of employment in the informal sector. A fifth meeting was held in May 2002 in connection with International Labour Conference. The purpose of this meeting was to plan future work on statistics on the informal economy.

From the beginning WIEGO has worked actively with the Delhi Group through supporting participants to attend each session –from the second held in Ankara in 1998 to the sixth and most recent held in Rio de Janeiro September 2002. The Delhi Group has also reviewed work that was supported by WIEGO.

Working with various partners the WIEGO Statistics Program has supported/ undertaken the following projects:

1. Study on place of work – in collaboration with United Nations Statistics Division and ILO Statistics Bureau. Methodological research and testing on the inclusion of the variable “place of work “ in household surveys – particularly labour force surveys – with the objective of improving the collection of data on home-based workers and street vendors. A meeting on this work of this project was held in Geneva in connection with the Delhi Group in 2000 and ILO published the research in the report, On Measuring Place of Work in 2002.

2. Workshop on Informal Sector Statistics in Latin America—October 16-18 in Santiago, Chile in collaboration with ILO/Latin America. Seven Latin American countries participated to assess progress and gaps in the measurement of the informal sector in the region. A workshop report was published in both English (Click Here) and Spanish (Haga Click Aquí)

3. The preparation of Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture, a report for the 2002 International Labour Conference. This report was undertaken in collaboration with ILO. The report provides a statistical picture using the available data of the informal economy worldwide.

4. On-going compilation of official statistics by Jacques Charmes and his development of the residual method to prepare estimates of informal employment where direct measures are not available. These data and estimates provided the basis for Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture.