Informality and Welfare: New Insights from the Job Satisfaction of Workers in Indonesia
利用印度尼西亚家庭生活调查数据，研究发现非正规工人比正规工人更不满意，但非正规自雇者比非正规受薪者更满意，且满意度差异仅存在于非正规企业的受薪工人中。
Informal employment remains ubiquitous in developing-country labour markets. While informality has been associated with poor outcomes—such as low wages and precarious working conditions—it has been argued that some informal jobs could be beneficial for workers due to non-pecuniary characteristics—such as autonomy and flexibility. We revisit this long-running theoretical debate by analysing job satisfaction, a broad measure of worker welfare. Using two waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey, we estimate fixed effects regressions to show that informal workers are less likely to be satisfied with their jobs than formal workers. This finding is robust to different estimation strategies, including a matched sample of sector movers and stayers. However, the likelihood of job satisfaction varies considerably among informal workers, with informal self-employed workers being more likely to be satisfied with their jobs than informal salaried workers. Moreover, this satisfaction differential only applies to informal salaried workers in informal enterprises, suggesting a need to better understand the employment conditions facing this group of workers.