Urbanisation, Economic Development, and Feminisation of Informal Employment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59926/jodprp.vol10/2026/10Keywords:
Urbanisation, Informal Sector, Feminisation, Employment, Women, Panel DataAbstract
The study builds upon the widely studied relationship between urbanisation and the proportion of females in informal employment by analysing a unique correlation across varying national income levels. To examine how this relationship changes non-linearly across different stages of economic development, denoted by the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the study applies a high-dimensional fixed effects model with interaction terms to a panel dataset of 126 countries, across a time period of 15 years, from 2010 to 2024. The study’s quantitative analysis on the secondary dataset sourced from the International Labour Organization and the World Bank reveals that the effect of urbanisation on female informal employment is non-linear and conditional upon the level of economic development in a country. Moreover, the marginal effect of urbanisation on female informal employment decreases as GDP per capita increases, resulting in a U-shaped, non-monotonic transformation. Thus, the effect of urbanisation on female informal employment gradually neutralises as the national income level increases. The nature of the study’s results calls for female-oriented labour policies to be context-driven rather than uniform, depending on the country’s level of economic development. Specifically, the study opens a path to investigating the differing requirements of the labour landscape across three categories of income levels and suggests policies to be tailored differently for each.
JEL Classification Codes: O17, O11, O18, J46
Conflict of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgement: The views and opinions are those of the authors and do not represent the views of any institution.
AI Declaration/Use of Generative AI: No AI tools were used in this study.
Funding: No
Article History
Submitted: 16 Jan 2026; Last Revised: 25 July 2026; Accepted: 7 Oct. 2026
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