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social insurance, and need for institutional, businessand labour reforms that have lacked enforcementand failed to keep in touch with changingeconomic realities.The expansion of manufacturing and industryhas led to a relative decline in the informaleconomy in China, Japan, the Republic of Koreaand Singapore. While the informal economy hadalso declined from 60 to 57 percent in Thailandfrom 1980 and 1994 because of the economicboom, with the effect of the economic recessionof 1997 it grew again to 60 percent. 46 Althougheconomic recession leads to an increase in‘survivalist’ economic activities suggesting thepoverty mitigating role of the informal economy,economic prosperity has also been directly relatedto an increase in the informal economy, asin Indonesia, because of increased opportunitiesand the ability of the informal enterprises to respondto new market opportunities. An expansionof the informal economy in the former circumstancesreflects marginalization of economic activitiescharacterised by low productivity, low incomesand low standards of living. 47 On the otherhand, expansion of the informal economy duringan economic boom is related to the expediencyof bypassing over-bearing bureaucratic processesand business practices that can constrain firmsin the formal economy from responding quickly tomarket signals and increasing demand.Women in the Informal EconomyWorldwide, women’s share of informal economyemployment has remained between 60 percentand 80 percent. Moreover, the number of femalesin the labour force is continuously on the rise andwomen in the informal economy most probablynumber much more than reflected in availablestatistics. (Girls, too, would be among their numbers.)They comprise most of the unpaid labour,are often home-based workers, and thus fall easilythrough gaps in enumeration as data and statisticson household level is still difficult to measure. Inmany countries, women are also drawn to the informaleconomy because they lack the right to ownand inherit property and are therefore obstructedfrom activity in the formal economy, as they donot have assets to use as security for credits, etc.A statistical snapshot of women in the informaleconomy around the world reveals: 481) Informal employment is generally a largersource of employment for women than for menin the developing world. Other than in the MiddleEast and North Africa, where 42 percentof women workers are in informal employment,60 percent or more of women workers in thedeveloping world are in informal employment(outside agriculture). The comparative figuresfor informal employment, as share of non-agriculturalemployment by sex and region, areas follow: in sub-Saharan Africa, 84 percentof women workers compared to 63 percent ofmen workers; in Latin America, 58 percent ofwomen workers, 48 percent of men workers,and in Asia, 73 percent of women to 70 percentof men.2) Although women’s labour-force participationrates are lower than men’s, the limited dataavailable points to the importance of women inhome-based work and street vending in developingcountries: 30-90 percent of street vendors,except in societies that restrict women’smobility; 35-80 per-cent of all home-basedworkers, including both self-employed andhome workers; and 80 percent or more of homeworkers — industrial outworkers who work athome).3) Although women’s labour force participationrates are lower than men’s, women representthe vast majority of part-time workers in many215