In 2023, the formality rate in Peru went from 26% to 28.9%, while the informality rate fell from 74% to 71.1%, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI). Approximately, 3 out of every 10 workers operate within the legal framework.
The data comes after learning that, during the first year of Dina Boluarte’s government, the economy fell 0.55% – its worst result since 1998, not counting the pandemic.
By size, 85.1% of those employed in companies with 1 to 10 workers are informal (mypes), and 46.7% are informal in those with 11 to 50 workers (small companies); Meanwhile, the bulk of the formal ones (83.7%) are in large companies, with 51 or more workers (medium-sized).
The sectors that The most concentrated informal sectors are agriculture, fishing and mining (80.3%), manufacturing (62.3%), construction (77.9%), commerce (70.6%) and services (58.6%).
Has labor informality really regressed?
The labor activist Fernando Cuadros Luque explains that, Although there is an improvement by reducing informality to 71.1%, barely a third is of employees not declared on the payroll, and the remaining two thirds correspond to independent workers who do not pay taxes.
“This inflates informality. More important is to see the informality of employees or dependents. This is the reality of labor informality. The other thing is not going to move because the independents are precarious, they do not declare nor will they do so for many years,” he explained to La República.
Thus, national labor informality in the private sphere, by 2022, reached 61% (and in rural areas it shot up to 86.4%).
Source: Larepublica
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