18 effort to improve education could focus on young single women in poverty who struggle to complete school and lack access to strong educational resources. Argentina might consider tailoring education and training more specifically for formal jobs in the workforce. Argentina could consider creating a guide that provides step-by-step guidance and training for informal business owners, to encourage and facilitate their formalizing. This guide could be developed in close cooperation with businesses, unions, and the government to ensure needs of all parties are represented. Focus may be placed on increasing attendance in secondary school (grade 6 to grade 12) for young men and women who are in poverty, because 60% of informal workers do not finish secondary school (Bertranou et al., 2013). In 2019, the World Bank approved the Improving Inclusion in Secondary and Higher Education project for $341 million in order to reduce dropout rates and increase access to education in Argentina (Budkin & Romig, 2019). This increase in educated residents will require a parallel increase in available skilled jobs. Lastly, informal employees might benefit from protecting their health and rights by working with NGOs to facilitate forming unions and working with the formal sector to ensure safer working conditions. In Zambia, trade unions have established the Centre for Informal Sector Employment Promotion (CISEP), which provides business information, needs assessment, business counselling, and organizational support. Unions in Burkina Faso and Niger have placed many informal sector workers in their countries into national trade unions, which are now recognized and operational (ILO, 2005). Such organizations could be created in Argentina by the existing formal trade unions to support informal workers through training, health and labor rights, and community building. However, this increased support of informal workers may risk increased scrutiny and regulation of the informal sector by the government. The consequences may be stricter tax laws for informal workers and more rigid labor regulations for informal employers, which might prove counterproductive because many informal jobs may be eliminated. Conclusion The difficulties in understanding and combating the informal economy have troubled Argentine policy makers for decades. The informal economy hit its highest level (60%) during the 2001 recession in Argentina. Before then, it rose steadily year after year due to increasing pressure on small businesses in the formal economy and lack of opportunities for less-skilled and less-educated workers in the formal sector. After 2004, the informal sector steadily declined due mostly to a strong economy. Since 2016, Argentina has implemented a few laws to ease both financial and regulatory stress for small businesses in the formal economy to reduce barriers to entry. Unfortunately, since 2018, the informal economy in Argentina has spiked again due to recession and the pandemic. It is idealistic to expect tomove all informal jobs into the formal sector in the near term. Many of these jobs cannot survive in the formal sector’s current state; high tax rates and added financial burdens make formalizing many of these jobs infeasible. If a street market’s vendors are surviving on very thin profit margins, and if they had to pay taxes and employee benefits, such small enterprises likely would not survive without increasing their prices. Such increases, in turn, would shift the financial burden to consumers in an already fragile economy, which is not a viable or long-term solution. It may be crucial to ensure that informal jobs keeping many residents out of extreme poverty are not destroyed but are either moved to the formal economy or kept in the informal economy, with expanded protections via wage and labor regulations. To improve the lives of millions of Argentinian residents, along with reaching its sustainability and development goals, Argentina’s government could reduce the barriers to entry into the formal economy and increase access to education and training opportunities for all of its residents. In the long run, these efforts will decrease poverty and inequality, while increasing tax revenues and GDP growth.
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