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The informal sector in West Africa has some distinctive
characteristics. Informality usually connotes small and unorganized
producers operating on the fringes of the formal economy. In West
African countries, however, the normal situation is to some extent
reversed: a dynamic informal sector dominates the stagnant formal
economy. Moreover, in these countries, small operators coexist with
very large and politically well-connected informal enterprises and
well-organized networks. Notwithstanding its importance, there have
been relatively few systematic studies of this dual feature of the
informal sector in West Africa, and consequently too little is
known about it. One of our hypotheses is that determinants and
appropriate policy responses are likely to differ between "large"
and "small" informal operations. This volume focuses on the urban
informal sector in three capital cities: Dakar (Senegal), Cotonou
(Benin) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). These three countries have
important differences and as a group, are quite representative of
francophone West Africa and to a lesser extent West Africa as a
whole. The authors use a mix of quantitative and qualitative
approaches with data obtained from our new Bank surveys of 900
firms in the three cities, interviews with knowledgeable
stakeholders and participants, and all available secondary data.
For the surveys, the authors designed their sampling strategy to
include three distinctive categories of firms: formal, small
informal, and large informal. In addition, they developed a
comprehensive definition of informality to reflect its complexity
and heterogeneneity. The definition (Chapter 1) covers six
components of informality, whereas previous definitions are
generally limited to a binary classification based on one or two
indicators. The results for West Africa corroborate many findings
from earlier studies, particularly for small informal firms. In
addition, the authors break new ground by shedding light on the
large informal sector and the influence of institutional and
socio-cultural factors in shaping the informal sector.
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