The purpose of this book is to introduce, discuss, illustrate, and evaluate the colorful palette of analytical techniques that can be applied to the analysis of household survey data, with an emphasis on the innovations of the past decade or so.

Most of the chapters begin by introducing a methodological or policy problem, to motivate the subsequent discussion of relevant methods. They then summarize the relevant techniques, and draw on examples many of them from the authors own work and aim to convey a sense of the potential, but also the strengths and weaknesses, of those techniques.

This book is meant for graduate students in statistics, economics, policy analysis, and social sciences, especially, but certainly not exclusively, those interested in the challenges of economic development in the Third World. Additionally, the book will be useful to academics and practitioners who work closely with survey data. This is a book that can serve as a reference work, to be taken down from the shelf and perused from time to time."

The purpose of this book is to introduce, discuss, illustrate, and evaluate the colorful palette of analytical techniques that can be applied to the analysis of household survey data, with an emphasis on the innovations of the past decade or so. Most of the chapters begin by introducing a methodological or policy problem, to motivate the subsequent discussion of relevant methods. They then summarize the relevant techniques, and draw on examples - many of them from the authors' own work - and aim to convey a sense of the potential, but also the strengths and weaknesses, of those techniques. This book is meant for graduate students in statistics, economics, policy analysis, and social sciences, especially, but certainly not exclusively, those interested in the challenges of economic development in the Third World. Additionally, the book will be useful to academics and practitioners who work closely with survey data. This is a book that can serve as a reference work, to be taken down from the shelf and perused from time to time.

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.