International Network for Knowledge and Comparative Socioeconomic Analysis of Informality and the Policies to be Implemented for their Formalization in the European Unión and Latin America (INSEAI)

Project summary

The INSEAI project aims to create an international network for knowledge and comparative socioeconomic analysis of informality and policies to be implemented for its formalisation in the EU and Latin America. The interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach involves academic (nine from UE and seven from LA), non-academic (three from UE and four from LA), and four non-eligible funding entities. Training activities and debate events will be organised throughout secondments, and specific tools (to detect, prevent and avoid informality) will be developed with the network members and people from their environment's societal collaboration. INSEAI Network faces at least seven critical challenges currently claimed by stakeholders at HEI in Europe and LA:

• Raising the level of research organisation in the region in the informal issues covering the current state-of-the-art knowledge and formalisation governance lacks.
• Multiplying the effect of research results opens the possibility of catching public policy interest.
• Driving the PhD students' attention to informality as an endemic issue deeply rooted in the globalised dynamics changing people's lives and stratifying world peripheral capitalist positions.
• Developing Open Science, promoting gender equality, and consolidating the network continuity.
• Developing training tasks, exchanging knowledge and methodologies, and trying to innovate in analysis and quantification tools with the support of research and dissemination technologies.
• Managing external databases and those generated by the network to offer tools (using big data, algorithms, apps) for public use in favour of informality knowledge and estimation and the formalisation processes governance.
• Bringing together research and innovation interests from academic and civil society entities to understand the convergences and divergences in structuring labour markets and informality dynamics in regions with different degrees of development.

Objectives

The objective of this project is to create an International Network for Knowledge and Comparative Socioeconomic Analysis of Informality and the Policies to be Implemented for their Formalization in the European Union and Latin America -INSEAI-, with the participation of groups of academics from universities and technicians and researchers from academic centres involved in this subject or the tools necessary for the advancement of their knowledge.

This network proposes an interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach to informality to analyse the problem of informality with a global vision in connection with employment and formalisation policies, evaluating their design and implementation in the different areas of the European Union and Latin America.

Given the current state of knowledge on the subject contained in an exhaustive interdisciplinary bibliography, the compilation, analysis, and synthesis of the theoretical and empirical works (focused on those that refer to the European and Latin American spaces) have been carried out so far.

The research carried out by each of the groups participating in this network and the literature on the subject, in general, are abundant, diverse, and have a long tradition.