Publication Details
Abstract
The article develops and tests a methodological approach to the comprehensive statistical assessment of informal employment in the rural areas of Uzbekistan. The study draws on the standard adopted by the 21st International Conference of Labour Statisticians of the International Labour Organization (2023), SDG indicator 8.3.1, and the modern methodology of statistical research of informal employment at the regional level (multidimensional classification, integration of factor and cluster analysis, data mining). Based on official data of the Statistics Agency of the Republic of Uzbekistan for 2018-2025, the national dynamics of informal employment are analyzed, and its change over 2019-2024 is decomposed using the shift-share method. The results show that the 2.5 percentage point decrease in the informal employment rate was driven mainly by the outflow of employment from agriculture (−1.41 percentage points) and by formalization within agriculture (−2.62 percentage points), whereas informality in non-agricultural sectors, on the contrary, increased by 1.11 percentage points. The authors developed an integral index of regional informality risk (I_RIR) based on six official statistical indicators: the indicators were rescaled to a 1-100 scale, the weights were determined by the entropy method, and aggregation was performed using a weighted geometric mean. Using the k-means and Ward methods, the 14 regions were grouped into four clusters (adjusted Rand index of 0.737). The highest informality risk was recorded in Kashkadarya (87.1), Samarkand (86.2), Khorezm (85.5) and Surkhandarya (81.3) regions. External validation of the index (correlation with per capita income r = −0.911) and a sensitivity analysis based on varying the weights by ±20% confirmed the robustness of the results. The study proposes a cluster-differentiated formalization policy and regional weights for the target achievement coefficient.