Editorial

Assalaamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu.

Hope you are fine and so are we. Time ticks by, water flows down, sun glows as we grow old sometimes not that much bold. Budget comes with the passage of a year in every country, be it poor or rich, and budget sees changes year to year too. Budget is all about formal sectors of a country. Informal sector remains out of the budget purview and it had been so since time immemorial. In Bangladesh, 87 per cent of the labour force is employed in the informal economy according to the 2010 Labour Force Survey. Those working in the informal economy include wage labourers, self-employed persons, unpaid family labour, piece-rate workers, and other hired labour. They are out of the purview of the budget. They least care about the budget.

According to International Labour Organisation
two billion people – more than 61pc of the world’s employed population – make their living in the informal economy, stressing that a transition to the formal economy is a condition to realize decent work for all. Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture provides comparable estimates on the size of the informal economy and a statistical profile of informality using criteria from more than 100 countries. When excluding agriculture, half of the employed population are in informal employment, according to the report. In Africa, 85.8 per cent of employment is informal. The proportion is 68.2 per cent in Asia and the Pacific, 68.6 per cent in the Arab States, 40.0 per cent in the Americas and 25.1pc in Europe and Central Asia. The report shows that 93pc of the world’s informal employment is in emerging and developing countries. Informal employment is a greater source of employment for men (63.0 per cent) than for women (58.1 per cent). Out of the two billion workers in informal employment worldwide, just over 740 million are women. Women are more exposed to informal employment in most low- and lower-middle income countries and are more often found in the most vulnerable situations. The grim picture of the world’s informal economy substantiates that most of the people of the world has nothing to do with the budgets. But as there are lots of hypes about budgets so we are running budget as cover story. Hope you will like the story and meet you next month inshallah.