The Informal Economy in pan-Africa: Review of the Literature, Themes, Questions, and Directions for Management Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The informal economy is an important phenomenon in African countries, accounting for up to 90% of the jobs in the lowest income Sub-Saharan countries such as Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Management research about Africa, therefore, cannot be complete without a closer look at and a better understanding of the informal economy on the continent, the opportunities it brings and challenges it faces. Research on the informal economy started during the early 1970s has been conducted mainly by economists and sociologists. Managerial and organizational knowledge of the informal economy in Africa, however, remains largely underdeveloped. We reviewed the literature on the informal economy taking a pan-African approach by surveying 102 studies published from 1992 to 2017 in English, French and Portuguese language outlets. We summarize the current state of the literature, identify seven general themes, raise pertinent research questions, and suggest directions to further advance research about the informal economy with a focus on management and organization knowledge in all of Africa.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".