Chart of the Week: The Potential for Growth and Africa’s Informal Economy

As our Chart of the Week shows, the informal economy in sub-Saharan Africa is the second-largest in the world, after Latin America and the Caribbean. From 2010 to 2014, sub-Saharan Africa’s informal economy accounted for 38 percent of GDP to the region. Within the region, however, there is significant variation in the size of informal economies. They range from a low of 20 to 25 percent of GDP in Mauritius, South Africa, and Namibia, to a high of 50 to 65 percent in Tanzania and Nigeria. As the chart shows, informality persists even in advanced economies, which means that the shift from informal to formal will take many years. –IMF Blog/