Based on primary data from urban and rural informal workers in Hooghly district of India, the paper attempts to explore the welfare of informal workers using the concept of subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is conceptualised through two broad dimensions-psychological well-being and life satisfaction. An individual-specific composite index is constructed to quantify subjective well-being followed by a series of regression analysis on the constructed indices. The findings suggest income to be a strong positive influencer of overall subjective well-being as well as life satisfaction and psychological well-being of informal workers. But a segregated analysis reveals that factors influencing subjective well-being distinctly differ across rural and urban workers. Rural workers tend to have higher well-being score than their urban counterpart and income does not have significant effect on their subjective well-being. Also, regular wage-earners tend to score higher in overall subjective wellbeing as well as life satisfaction than self-employed and casual labours.
Decent work is considered to be crucial in the process of inclusive development and poverty alleviation in economies dominated by informal employment. This study is an attempt to understand decent work achievements of rural and urban informal workers of Hooghly district, West Bengal, India. The study uses the theoretical framework of seven work-based security dimensions from People’s Security Survey (by International Labour Organization) and constructs seven individual-level sub-indices and one composite individual-level decent work index using primary survey data. Then, it investigates the effect of the supply-side parameters on decent work using simple OLS regressions. The findings indicate ineffectiveness of education to improve decent work condition of informal workers in the absence of adequate skill-building initiatives. It also reveals the poor work condition of rural informal workers and self-employed workers in general. The study emphasises the need of vocationalisation of education and upgrading the quality of informal employment to achieve decent work.
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