2016 National Accounts Base Change: Measuring the Informal Economy

As part of its work to develop a new 2016 national accounts base, Cameroon’s National Institute of Statistics (NSI) has adopted a new approach to measuring the informal economy and quantifying its weight in the economy. According to the recommendations of the 2008 SNA ($25.75), where possible, two supplementary tables for the informal sector should be prepared, one covering income generation and formation and the other covering employment. These tables can be prepared either using available statistics on the activities of informal sector enterprises (the direct method) or on the basis of certain standards and ratios (the indirect method). The indirect method, also referred to as the “labour input method” in the literature on labour force statistics, is at the heart of the proposed compilation process and thus makes it possible to arrive at a measure of the informal economy from the central framework of the SNA.This note presents Cameroon’s experience in measuring the informal economy, which is estimated to constitute nearly half of the wealth created in 2016, mainly through the 2010 EESI Employment and Informal Sector Survey. The article proposes possible solutions to the problems related to the measurement of the aggregates of the informal economy in the central framework of the SNA, in a context marked by the absence of recent survey data.