What can I sell? thousands in Panama, pushed into informality, wonder

A small table where there are masks and bags with grains is the improvised shop of Sonora Espinosa, a 60-year-old unemployed woman who looks for her daily livelihood on the busy Central Avenue of the capital of Panama.

The hustle and bustle of December is over and in these first weeks of January the movement in the famous Peatonal, as Central Avenue is also known, is very slow.

On this boulevard there are stores, fixed stalls of peddlers, which are small establishments that have a municipal permit, and itinerant and improvised vendors like Sonora, who shouts “masks” while displaying their product.

“It was more hectic in December but now, and in the previous months, it has been very sad. There is no money, people just pass by (on the boulevard) to clear their minds full of worries, but the money is not there. There are days that are hard and difficult for me, ”said the woman bitterly.

Sonora, who lives with her husband, also in his sixties and unemployed, ran a school cafeteria until the pandemic forced the closure of schools in the country in March 2020. He assured that none of the nine people who worked there now have a formal occupation.

He hopes that with the reopening of schools next March, he will be able to resume the cafeteria business, whose untimely closure almost two years ago due to the health emergency caused “an enormous loss, more than US$5,000” in products.

Almost 48 out of 100 work informally

Sonora Espinosa is part of the 47.6% of economically active people who are in the informal economy in Panama, that is, 677,875, according to official data from last October.

In 2019, before the pandemic, the informality rate was 44.9%. In the midst of a health emergency, it climbed to 52.8% and unemployment to 18.5%, the highest rate in 20 years, according to official data from September 2020, the year in which the economy collapsed 17.9%.

Dependent on services and closely linked to the external sector, the Panamanian economy has begun to recover: it expanded by 14.9% between January and September 2021 and unemployment stood at 11.3% last October.

But for Rolando Gordón, dean of the Faculty of Economics of the state University of Panama (UP), the main one in the country, in 2022 it will be “difficult” to improve employment levels.

“The employment that is being generated is informal,” which has an impact on the State’s finances “because the informal does not pay direct taxes,” said Gordón.

What can I sell?

Ricaurte Ruse is a 41-year-old Panamanian who has been an informal vendor for more than 16 years in a permanent position in the Peatonal. He acknowledges that in recent times “there are many people who have ventured into this peddler business.”

“Many ask me ‘what can I sell?, what can I do? They are people who are not into this (selling on the street) but the pandemic has forced them,” stressed Ruse, who with his “dry merchandise” stand, as they call clothes and accessories, maintains, sometimes with great difficulty, his wife and three children.

For Mario Antonio Rosh, 50 years old and with more than 30 as an informal vendor, “there is a great need, there is hunger in this country” because of the pandemic.

“I know a lot of people who had a job in construction or another type of job and have ended up selling peddlers, even street vendors. I know that the need has a dog face, that many people feel sorry for this, but they have had to do it for their children, and I have seen a quite remarkable increase, “he assured.

Raúl Palacios, 43, worked as a contractor in a building “but the pandemic ended everything” and he had to return to peddlers, which “is not that bad”, but “the economy is not good, because there are about 40% -50% of people working and the rest are on the street, seeing what is being done”.

“A permanent job is something that is safe for the family and the home, which has so many expenses, and sometimes the peddlers don’t come out as much for the expense,” said Palacios, who asked the Government and the private company “to find a solution” unemployment and informality.