Does it Matter to be Informal? Type of employment and political opinions in the MENA region

The paper analyzes the relationship between informal employment and political opinions in the MENA region using IV estimation techniques. We argue that working in the informal sector has a negative impact on how individuals view government’s performance even after controlling for a battery of socio-economic characteristics. Our findings reveal that both narrow and broader definition of informal employment in the MENA region is significantly increasing the likelihood of adverse perceptions. Individuals in the informal sector are more skeptical about government’s performance in job creation and redistribution. Also, their level of trust for political actors are lower and they declare greater levels of corruption. Moreover, we demonstrated that the impact is not conditional on incomes and even respondents belonging to high income households in the MENA region evaluate the government more negatively if they are in the informal sector. Our results are robust to sampling, recoding variables, and model selection.