Informal Sector Survey Methods Design

Since the early1970s, the informal sector, represented by small businesses, individual enterprises, is growing rapidly in developing countries. For China is the world's largest developing country, its informal sector characteristics is particularly evident. On the one hand, small-scaled informal sector enterprises can cover in areas where is difficult for formal sector to get involved, to meet consumers'demand for low-income people; on the other hand, informal sector provides a large number of jobs for laid-off workers and staffs with difficulties to find a job, which eases employment pressure greatly. The development of the informal sector is a double-edged sword, for the informal sector can not get rid of defects such like relatively poor working conditions, relatively weak innovation capacity, low output efficiency and poor treatment of workers, which is brought by its "low, small, scattered" operation characteristics. With its great social effect, the informal sector has gradually attracted widespread international attention. What's scale of informal sector production? How many people work in the informal sector? What role does informal sector exactly play in the national economy? These questions'answers lie in the data collection of informal sector. The demand for informal sector data has become researchers' general and urgent demand. In this context, the paper launched to construct the survey program of informal sector in China.The first chapter elaborates the theoretical and practical significance of studies on informal sector, providing the brief summary of studies In the domestic and abroad.The second chapter is the study of the informal sector's basic theory. Based on the internationally accepted SNA perspective, this chapter is devoted to the clarifying the investigation object, analyzing the entire and categorized connotation of informal sector, discussing the factors which determine the origination and development of informal sector. According to ILO and SNA (1993) definitions, the informal sector is defined as "consisting of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned. These units typically operate at a low level of organization, with little or no division between labour and capital as factors of production and on a small scale. Labour relations-where they exist-are based mostly on casual employment, kinship or personal and social relations rather than contractual arrangements with formal guarantees", including informal own-account enterprises and enterprises of informal employers.The third chapter is the theory of survey methods and its applications. This chapter systematically introduces household survey, enterprise survey, household-enterprise mixed survey, giving the elaboration of thought, process, application condition and present application situation of methods, and also combining the analysis of each method's merit and defect in detail.The forth chapter presents the design of informal sector survey in China. China is still in the primary stage of socialism, which determines the informal sector in china not only has the similar common characteristics with other countries, but also has its own characteristics. Therefore, this chapter analyzes the entire and categorized connotation of informal sector in China, and then puts forward operating standards of informal sector enterprises. In this paper, the informal sector comprises of "the natural persons or unincorporated organizations engaged in the non-agricultural production for the purpose of sale or exchange, which are always legitimate business, flexible set of accounting accounts, with employees not more than seven (including7)." On this basis, combined with china's existing system, this chapter separately designs household based survey program, economy census based enterprise survey program, and household-enterprise mixed survey program.The fifth chapter is the Summary and future prospects for the full text. In this paper, the design of informal sector survey is only a vision. There are still lots of problems, and also a lot of issues to be resolved for future research.In summary, this paper innovates in the following areas:I. Base on the study of literatures, this paper sorts out and evaluates all kinds of informal sector survey methods, demonstrating the level of research in this area. II. This paper, based on statistical accounting perspective, examines the Chinese characteristics of the informal sector, and seriously analyzes its causes and mechanism. III. Propose and Improve several informal sector survey program which are suit for the informal sector in China. Combined with the characteristics of national statistical system, this paper successfully designs several survey programs, such as household survey based on population census, the urban household surveys, economic census, enterprise survey and independent household-enterprise survey.