The Dynamics of Labour Informality in Brazil, 2003-2019
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the evolution of labour informality in Brazil between 2003 and 2019, a period marked by strong political, economic and social inflections. In the first section, we offer a brief reflection on the terms of the historical debate on informality and its relation to the transformations of the Brazilian economy. In section two we describe the remarkable process of labour formalisation that took place in the country between 2003 and 2014, pointing out its exceptionality and principal determinants. In section three, we note the reversal of this formalisation trend. With the recession of 2015–2016, informal and precarious work increased sharply, exacerbated by newly flexible labour laws and the emergence of new precarious labour relations. We conclude that the Brazilian experience in this new century shows that the formalisation of labour relations is strongly related to more general conditions of economic development and the solidity of public institutions. Furthermore, and in contrast to the views held in mainstream economics, initiatives to simplify and ease the regulatory framework appear to coexist with increasing levels of precariousness and informal work. KEYWORDS: labour informality; Brazilian labour market; public policy; labour regulation; gig economy
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".