• Asian Journal of Innovation and Policy
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.1-38
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• 2021

The paper examines the role of the informal sector on innovation activities of urban formal manufacturing enterprises in India. It provides empirical evidence on firm-level linkages between formal and informal sectors by using the World Bank Enterprise Survey, 2013-14 and the Innovation Follow-up survey, 2014. Primarily, the paper aims to examine the effect of informal sector competition on innovation in urban formal manufacturing enterprises in India. Secondly, the paper analyses the mediation effect of informal sector competition on innovations in the urban manufacturing enterprises. It determines the direct and indirect influence of business regulations and constraints on innovation outcomes through the mediation effect of informal sector competition by using the SEM "Structural Equation Modeling" guidelines. The econometric results show that informal sector competition has a negative effect on the introduction of product innovations while industry-level informal sector competition has a positive effect on product innovation through the local knowledge spillovers from the informal to the formal sector. However, the informal sector competition was found to have no significant effect on the probability of introducing process innovations. Further, the results show the inhibitive role of informal sector competition on innovation in urban formal manufacturing enterprises is more severe for firms with heavy regulatory burdens and is relatively weakened in firms with resource constraints. This suggests that the informal sector plays an important role in the NIS (National Innovation System) in India.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.65-92
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• 2003

This study explored and described the life course of poor female household heads. The data was gathered by in-depth interviews with thirteen poor female heads of households. Most of poor female household heads grew up in poor families. nev could not be educated properly due to their families' poverty and boy preference, and they moved to urban areas to become informal sector laborers. After the marriages, their living conditions became worse, because many of them got married to so lazy men who had alcoholic problems that were not willing to provide their families. The poor female heads of households were under difficulties owing to low income and unstable labor Condition. The economic hardship disturbed the interaction with kins and friends. Although they got in touch with these people, they had uncomfortable feelings because they did not have enough resources which made these relationships reciprocal. Therefore, social welfare policy were essential to support the poor female heads of households.

• Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.74-81
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• 2019

Upcycling generally refers to the conversion of waste materials to something useful or valuable and is a useful concept that can be applied not only to the waste design industry but also to waste recycling and resource circulation. Our study highlights upcycling as the key concept for improving the value of waste by redefining the concept as "the recycling of waste materials and discarded products in ways that enhance their value." Four upcycling strategies are linked to material flow analyses conducted on waste electronic and electrical equipment, specifically waste refrigerators and waste computers, to examine the technologies available for implementation and suggest guidelines for the promotion of upcycling. The amount of waste refrigerators collected by the formal sector was 121,642 tons/y and the informal sector, 63,823 tons/y. The current recycling ratio of waste refrigerators was estimated as 88.53%. A total of 7,585 tons/y of waste computers were collected by the formal sector and 3,807 tons/y by the informal sector after discharge. Meanwhile, the current recycling ratio of waste computers was estimated as 77.43%. We found that it is possible to introduce 28 upcycling technologies in the case of refrigerators, and 15 technologies are available to promote upcycling in the case of computers. By refining the broad concept of upcycling and looking at the stages of material flow, our approach presents universally applicable directions for incorporating upcycling in resource recovery and recirculation plans.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.21-39
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to investigate service support programs for the work-family balance in the community. Service support programs in the community are at beginning stages of development, because it has taken about 10 years to put a self-governing system into practice in Korea. This study concentrates on service support programs developed by various service organizations in the city and does not include any rural districts. First, the developmental process of the work-family balance model and type of the service support program in the community were studied. Next, the situation of care service support was examined based on written articles. Finally, a few suggestions were made f3r work-family balance in the community. The developmental situation of work-flmily balance in Korea is in a stage which is shifting from the company-leading model to a family-company-community model. The most common type of service support program offered in the community until now has been the informal sector through relatives, neighbors or friends. However, service support programs, in the public sector by the government and in the voluntary sector by nonprofit organizations and corporations, has rapidly been growing and the number of services from each sector has also increased. Profit organizations in the private sector, such as medical and care service centers, are also now rapidly increasing. It appears that service support programs contributing to the work-family balance in the community come from a number of sectors, including public, voluntary, private and informal sectors, to suit consumer needs.

• The Journal of Economics, Marketing and Management
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.7-23
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• 2015

Women are more disadvantaged than men in many fronts and this confines them to informal sector livelihood activities. Any attempt to improve women's economic status will require information on the organization, cost and returns to investment in the livelihood activities in which they predominate. This is the issue for this study which compared yield performance in artisanal fishing and fresh fish marketing. Primary data collected through multi-stage sampling method were analyzed using inferential statistics, budgeting and regression models. Empirical findings revealed that about 75.0% of fisher folks either had no formal education or acquired only primary school education while 50.0% of marketers had secondary school education. The budgeting model revealed fisher-folks' and marketers' annual net profit to be N2,882,626.00 and N640,227.00, respectively. Profit from fishing was significantly higher than that of fish marketing. At 53.2% for fishing and 40.3% for marketing, returns to investment was better in fishing. Regression model results showed the significant factors influencing returns to each livelihood strategy to include fishing ground, distance covered and years of experience. The major constraint faced by operators of both livelihoods groups was insufficient credit. Despite this, the livelihood strategies were shown to be profitable ventures which contributed to households' consumption expenditure. Organizing women informal sector operators into groups to enhance access to government support and formal credit are recommended for improving livelihood strategy performance.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.183-202
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• 1992

This study was undertaken to evaluate the living condition and the reality of visiting part-time workers through the survey. On the matter of living condition, the most difficult problem is financial problem followed by residential problem. On the matter of female's household labor, there was a considerable difference according to the houseband's age and academic background, and family monthly income. On the question of family relationship, it was found that there was rare communication between children and father because father was rigid to talk with. In the case of mother and children, they could not find time to talk with each other. In the group of the old aged, they work to make their living. On the other hand, in the group of younger generations and the higher educated, they replied that they should work whatever the work is. It was found that they were subjected to their work because of their financial situation and that they were under the double yoke of family and work because there were no legal protection and organizational devices.

• Advances in environmental research
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.237-249
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• 2016

The management of municipal solid waste (MSW) is essential for every community; and, it is currently a major challenge in Nigeria. This paper provides an overview of the current MSW management trends in Nigeria and proposes new sustainable MSW management systems. Across Nigerian cities, MSW management is characterized by inefficient collection and transportation to disposal sites. Collection services do not reach some unplanned areas and slums due to poor street network. Even some planned areas are not reached by collection services. The informal sector contributes to waste collection, resource recovery and recycling; however, their activities are not recognized by the governments. Markets exist for recovered materials but more efforts need to be geared towards intensive recovery of materials and expansion of these markets. Despite the high proportion of putrescible matter in MSW, the only form of treatment commonly used currently is open burning for volume reduction. The high organic fraction presents a great opportunity for composting and anaerobic digestion. Ultimate disposal is currently done in open dumpsites. This needs to be upgraded to engineered landfills that are properly sited and adequately operated by well trained personnel. There is an emerging waste stream of concern, electronic-waste (e-waste), that requires urgent sustainable management as e-waste are currently co-disposed with other waste streams or burnt in the open posing detrimental health impacts.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.397-407
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• 2022

The informal economy is a large part of the urban economy. The informal economy accounts for about half of Pakistan's GDP. This research examined nine different areas of Rawalpindi's Central Business District's business sector (CBD). A survey of 404 respondents from 16 CBD marketplaces enables a comprehensive examination of who works in the informal and formal economic sectors, how much they earn, their goals, perception of their job, and their degree of similarity to the rest of the working population. Furthermore, the statistics illustrate the pro-cyclical connections between the informal economic sector and the formal economy. The Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) technique is used for the analysis. The MLR results indicated the informal economic sector holds positive relation with earning members in a family, business expertise, average business sale, and negative relation with education level, satisfaction with government tax policies, household expense, and average investment in the business. From a resilience standpoint, governance is considered an intentional collective action to preserve a stable system condition. Hence, the current study recommends tax reforms and government institution reorganization to mobilize the informal sector and make effective institutional governance.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.396-404
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• 2014

The field of searching clothing, which is very difficult due to the nature of the informal sector, has been in an effort to reduce the recognition error and computational complexity. However, there is no concrete examples of the whole progress of learning and recognizing for cloth, and the related technologies are still showing many limitations. In this paper, the whole process including identifying both the person and cloth in an image and analyzing both its color and texture pattern is specifically shown for classification. Especially, deformable search descriptor, LBPROT_35 is proposed for identifying the pattern of clothing. The proposed method is scale and rotation invariant, so we can obtain even higher detection rate even though the scale and angle of the image changes. In addition, the color classifier with the color space quantization is proposed not to loose color similarity. In simulation, we build database by training a total of 810 images from the clothing images on the internet, and test some of them. As a result, the proposed method shows a good performance as it has 94.4% matching rate while the former Dense-SIFT method has 63.9%.

• Korean Journal of Labor Studies
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.213-260
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• 2013

This study pays attention to the restricted use and the possibility of standard position of contingent workers in Brazil. The labor market of Brazil has been developed by formal and informal labor sector, and informal sector includes various precarious workers as well as contingent workers. According to Brazilian Statistics Department, not contingent workers but informal labor focused in this paper have been slowly decreased since year 2000. In this context, this study investigated on the reasons of decreasing contingent employment in Brazil. The results demonstrate that decreased informal employment and instead increased standard workers could not be interpreted by recent the Braizil's economic boom. Along with literature review, the author conducted the case study regarding employment of contingent workers at six large foreign companies in Sao Paulo. The results of this show that the use of contingent employment was prohibited in regular daily works by the labor law and thus firms employed contingent workers in only temporary positions. Further, firms often promise standard positions for contingent workers when temporary employment contract was terminated since there is little or no exist of the differences of wage between standard and contingent worker in terms of 'same work same wage' and 'minimum wage'. In here, labor unions play a key role in employment change from contingent position to standard job. Consequently, decreasing of contingent workers and stepping stone to regular jobs seems to be triggered by both legal regulation on contingent employment and strong unions. This institutional perspective may extend the theoretical view on the use of contingent workers, and the author discuss that Brazil's case could provide practical implications to Korean labor policy.