placestats

Informal employment vs. Retirement age, men

Fades after adjusting for income

Across 41 countries, Informal employment and Retirement age, men rise and fall together at r = +0.63 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). Comparing only countries with similar income (GDP per person) leaves r = +0.57, which could easily be chance (q = 0.082, allowing for the many pairs tested, and allowing for countries in the same region being alike). Caution: correlation moves sharply once outliers are trimmed.

Comparing countries across the middle half of retirement age, men, 63.2 to 66.4 years, informal employment is worse by 14.2% of employment at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap is 8.6% of employment.

Link before adjusting (r)+0.628p = 1.1e-5 · 41 countries
After adjusting for national income+0.568p = 0.000 · likely range [+0.31, +0.75]
p, allowing for regions0.017standard error 0.160 · 6 regions
Check for luck (q)0.082across 12,497 pairs

How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.

Informal employment · % of employmentlink with income -0.88 · proxy
Retirement age, men · yearslink with income -0.19 · independent

“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.

Every country as a dot

Informal employment · % of employment →Retirement age, men · years →0.63%88.1%60.573Argentina: 51.6% of employment, 66.6 yearsAustria: 1.32% of employment, 63.5 yearsBelgium: 1.37% of employment, 61.6 yearsBulgaria: 1.2% of employment, 64.7 yearsBrazil: 35.6% of employment, 66.6 yearsSwitzerland: 1.48% of employment, 66.4 yearsChile: 26.4% of employment, 70 yearsCyprus: 1.68% of employment, 64.9 yearsCzechia: 2.26% of employment, 63.2 yearsGermany: 2.49% of employment, 64 yearsDenmark: 2.82% of employment, 65.1 yearsSpain: 2.2% of employment, 62.1 yearsEstonia: 2.4% of employment, 65.5 yearsFinland: 2.19% of employment, 64.3 yearsFrance: 3.15% of employment, 60.8 yearsUnited Kingdom: 6.51% of employment, 64.7 yearsGreece: 3.58% of employment, 61.7 yearsCroatia: 1.17% of employment, 61.7 yearsHungary: 1.31% of employment, 63.4 yearsIndonesia: 81% of employment, 73 yearsIndia: 88.1% of employment, 69.8 yearsIreland: 1.9% of employment, 65.6 yearsIceland: 1.97% of employment, 68.1 yearsItaly: 3.42% of employment, 63.3 yearsKorea, Rep.: 29.1% of employment, 72.3 yearsLithuania: 3.2% of employment, 64.3 yearsLuxembourg: 1.93% of employment, 60.5 yearsLatvia: 2.17% of employment, 65.7 yearsMexico: 56.4% of employment, 71.3 yearsMalta: 0.63% of employment, 64.2 yearsNetherlands: 2.63% of employment, 65.2 yearsNorway: 1.43% of employment, 66.1 yearsPoland: 8.62% of employment, 62.8 yearsPortugal: 4.73% of employment, 68.5 yearsRomania: 2.21% of employment, 68.8 yearsRussian Federation: 19.3% of employment, 63.2 yearsSlovak Republic: 4.37% of employment, 61.1 yearsSlovenia: 0.7% of employment, 63.1 yearsSweden: 2.83% of employment, 66.4 yearsTurkiye: 27.7% of employment, 66.3 yearsSouth Africa: 34.8% of employment, 63.1 yearsARGFRAIDNINDKORLUXMEXPRTROUSVKZAF

best-fit line line after adjusting

Four ways to measure the link

MethodrpCountries
Standard (Pearson), not adjusted+0.6281.1e-541
By rank (Spearman), not adjusted+0.3860.01341
Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income+0.5680.00041
By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income+0.3260.04041

The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 41 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: +0.060 (a minus sign means it grew).

How solid is it?

Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from +0.506 (without IDN) to +0.639 (without LUX). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: LUX (+0.071).

Fragile: this link may not hold up.
  • correlation moves sharply once outliers are trimmed
  • sign flips once outliers are trimmed
  • much weaker within regions than across them (largely a between-region difference)

Within each region

Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.

nr
Europe & Central Asia32+0.09

By income third

If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.

nr
Poorest third14+0.66
Middle third13-0.12
Richest third14+0.70

By largest religious group

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

nr
Christians35+0.40

Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = -0.035 after dropping 10 countries.

Two series, one country

Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.

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Over time, within countries

Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 19years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.

Within countries over time, there is no link that is clearly more than chance (r = +0.028, comparing each country only with itself over the years, and each year only with the same year elsewhere). Whatever the cross-country picture shows, countries whose informal employment moved did not tend to see their retirement age, men move with it.

Across countries (adjusted)+0.568for comparison
Within countries+0.024each country vs itself
…and vs the same year elsewhere+0.028q = 0.883 · 36 countries
Year-on-year changes-0.035q = 0.507
Read with care.
  • Almost all of the second indicator's variation is between countries, so the within-country estimate rests on a small part of the data.

430 country-years (one country in one year), 36 countries, 2000–2018, about 12 years each on average. Share of the variation that happens within countries over time: 11% for Informal employment, 2% for Retirement age, men. The margins of error allow for each country appearing many times, and for each year’s value being close to the year before.

Year-to-year changes are a cautious test, not a final answer. Looking only at changes from one year to the next removes each country’s own trends. But it also makes measurement mistakes louder, which pulls the results toward zero. A near-zero result here is weak evidence of no link, not proof.

With one measure years behind the other

0.40−0.4-100+6years Retirement age, men trails Informal employment →lag -10: r = -0.076 (n = 641)lag -9: r = -0.112 (n = 641)lag -8: r = -0.121 (n = 641)lag -7: r = -0.118 (n = 641)lag -6: r = -0.096 (n = 639)lag -5: r = -0.072 (n = 607)lag -4: r = -0.048 (n = 574)lag -3: r = -0.022 (n = 537)lag -2: r = 0.024 (n = 505)lag -1: r = 0.053 (n = 470)lag +0: r = 0.028 (n = 430)lag +1: r = 0.076 (n = 394)lag +2: r = 0.142 (n = 358)lag +3: r = 0.156 (n = 324)lag +4: r = 0.166 (n = 290)lag +5: r = 0.307 (n = 234)lag +6: r = 0.292 (n = 204)

Same year (lag 0): +0.028. A peak away from zero does not show which comes first. These series change slowly — this year’s value is close to last year’s. That makes the curve smooth and nearly symmetric, whatever produced the data. Even a sharp peak at one lag (a gap of some years) would not prove that one measure changes the other.

The largest value on this curve (+0.31 at lag +5) is higher than the same-year one by 0.28. That gap is not a finding. It is the largest of 17 closely related estimates, and picking the biggest of many tests always makes it look bigger. That is exactly why nothing on this site is ranked or chosen by lag.

The data


% of employment
years		Years
India IND88.1%69.82024, 2018
Indonesia IDN81%732023, 2018
Mexico MEX56.4%71.32024, 2018
Argentina ARG51.6%66.62024, 2018
Brazil BRA35.6%66.62025, 2018
South Africa ZAF34.8%63.12024, 2018
Korea, Rep. KOR29.1%72.32019, 2018
Turkiye TUR27.7%66.32024, 2018
Chile CHL26.4%702025, 2018
Russian Federation RUS19.3%63.22024, 2018
Poland POL8.62%62.82024, 2018
United Kingdom GBR6.51%64.72018
Portugal PRT4.73%68.52024, 2018
Slovak Republic SVK4.37%61.12024, 2018
Greece GRC3.58%61.72024, 2018

United Nations Global SDG Indicators Database; series compiled by the International Labour Organization (8.3.1) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (16.3.2)
OECD databases as named on each indicator: PISA, Social Expenditure Database (SOCX), Income Distribution Database, Development Assistance Committee statistics, Family Database, Government at a Glance, Corporate Tax Statistics, employment and environment statistics

Sources

Informal employment

Share of employment that is informal

International Labour Organization · via Our World in Data · CC BY 3.0 IGO · updated annual

Workers with no contract, no social protection or no registered employer, as the ILO (the UN's labour agency) makes them comparable across national labour force surveys. The World Bank's copy of this series was retired, so it comes from the UN's database for the Sustainable Development Goals.

Retirement age, men

Average effective age of retirement, men

OECD · via Our World in Data · CC BY 4.0 (OECD terms and conditions) · updated annual, except the snapshots noted per indicator

The age at which men actually stop working, averaged over five years, not the official pension age. It comes from a 2018 release that Our World in Data keeps as a snapshot, so the series ends there. Men's and women's ages are treated as measuring the same thing.

How this was computed

Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2018–2025. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 6 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 12,497 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated DYB 2024. How the country data works · explore Informal employment and Retirement age, men

This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that Informal employment changes Retirement age, men, or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.

More links with Informal employment or Retirement age, men