02019nam a22001457a 4500 524700 524700 240111b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d Shrestha, Sudhir 48000 Exploring the informal sector in Nepal: Performance trend, dualism, and rural-urban dynamics The Indian Journal of Labour Economics 66(3), Jul-Sep, 2023: p.765-791 We find the informal sector of Nepal, which employs nearly 60% of non-agricultural labour force, to have underperformed between the period 1995/96 and 2010/11. We locate a large performance gap between the ‘traditional/non-capitalist’ segment, comprising family-based household enterprises that occupy a majority portion of informal sector, and the ‘modern/capitalist’ segment employing wage labour, which shows heterogeneity existent within the informal sector. We find that, by employing an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression of independently pooled cross sections of enterprises over three rounds of Nepal Living Standard Survey (NLSS 1995/96, NLSS 2003/04, and NLSS 2010/11), the performance gap between the traditional/non-capitalist enterprises and the modern/capitalist enterprises did not lessen over time indicating a persistent dualism within the sector. We further explore the rural-urban dimension of informal sector, through the use of a regression-based decomposition exercise, to find that while the rural-urban differential in informal sector shrunk between the period 1995/96 and 2010/11, it is attributed to the underperformance of urban firms and the stagnancy of rural firms over time. The dismal performance of informal sector, particularly the existence of a large (non-declining) proportion of traditional/non-capitalist segment at a meagre income level, raises question on the possibility of transformation in the sector.- Reproduced https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41027-023-00460-7 The Indian Journal of Labour Economics LABOURS AR 0 0 ddc 0 0 399749 IIPA IIPA 2024-01-11 66(3), Jul-Sep, 2023: p.765-791 AR130519 2024-01-11 AR