 Thank you, Francie, for the introduction of WeGo, in particular, and of all of us. And I just want to also add my congratulations to you and wider and my thanks for being invited to help organize this panel and to speak. I'm going to try to make the case that the informal economy is integral to development economics and therefore to the future of development economics. And my remarks will be in four parts, brief, I hope. One I'll introduce the concept of informal employment and what we know about its size and composition. And then I'll talk about very quickly about the links between informal employment, poverty and inequality. And then the links between the informal economy, the formal economy, and formal state regulations. And end with a few suggestions about what next for the informal workforce. My point of departure and that of the WeGo network is that the informal is normal in quotation marks. It's in the sense that it is large and is growing in some contexts. It's normal in that most informal workers are trying to earn an honest living. They're not dodging taxes and regulations, they're just trying to earn a living. And they're not illegal criminal gray, underground black, all of those labels. And it's normal in the sense that the informal economy contributes to the formal economy and also, of course, to the total GDP. And the other point of departure is that informal employment is very directly linked to poverty reduction and inequality reduction. Because we believe like once on the ILO that decent work is a key pathway to reducing income poverty and inequality. And for those who don't know, the decent work agenda of the ILO has four pillars. One is economic opportunities. The second is rights, rights at work, property rights, different kinds of rights. The third is protection, legal and social protection. And the fourth is voice. In the ILO context, it's voice within the tripartite system. And in 2002, when the ILO had a general discussion on the informal economy, entitled decent work and the informal economy. The way they framed the issue because all the workers, the formal trade union workers were saying, are you promoting informality? And the way they framed it was, no, we're not promoting informality. We're trying to reduce the deficits of decent work in the informal economy with the case that these deficits are greater for informal workers than for formal workers. And so like that framing by the ILO, we do believe that to reduce income poverty and inequality, we need to reduce those decent work deficits of informal workers. And in the context of development economics, we do believe that the informal economy needs to be integrated into economic planning and economic policies. It isn't, it can't be treated just through social policies. It has to be integrated into economic policies. Just a quick one slider on the definition of informal employment. As Francie said that the name of WeGo has informal employment in it. We didn't realize when we gave it that name in 1997 that in 2003 there would be an international official statistical definition of informal employment. And this was promoted by the ILO and WeGo because we knew that there was informal wage employment outside the informal sector which is comprised of informal enterprises. So informal employment broadly defined and adopted by the International Conference of Labor Statisticians includes the self-employed in the informal enterprises which are unincorporated enterprises that may also be unregistered or small. And it includes wage workers in informal jobs and those are jobs without employment-linked social protection. And there are different categories of the self-employed, so defined, and different categories of informal wage labor so defined. With the ILO we have built the first ever database on informal employment with still informal employment as a share of non-agricultural employment because there is no international consensus on what informal employment in agriculture consists of. This is something the FAO and ILO still need to work on. So these are estimates, regional estimates of informal employment as a percentage of non-ag employment based on direct measures of informal employment in just over 40 countries and some residual estimates of another 40 countries using the direct measures and some regional weighting. So what we see is that we have an average and then the range within the regions that South Asia has the highest average of 82 percent and there is a range. In India where we also have measures of informal employment in agriculture, we know that it's actually 94 percent of total employment, 84 percent in non-ag, but when you add ag, it becomes 94 percent. It's 66 percent in sub-Saharan Africa but with a wide range because in the southern Cone, especially South Africa, it's much lower where it's much higher in other parts of Africa. East in Southeast Asia, 65 percent. Latin America around half. And Santiago Levy referred to the different parts of Latin America, quite different incidents. And the Middle East and North Africa is the only region where it's less than half, but I'm told there may be some statistical problems there. So that gives you the sense of the size. And this slide is going to tell you several things. One is its composition. The pyramid, iceberg, whatever figure in the middle, has six segments. These are status and employment segments. And status and employment is one of the main classification systems used in labor statistics. And so we have six segments within the informal economy. We have employers who hire others. We have informal employees. There are people who know in the morning where they're going. They go off to that workshop or the small factory or small shop, but they don't have a standard employment contract. We have own account operators. These are people who do not hire others. They may be single person operators or heads of family firms, casual day laborers. We have the industrial outworkers, the subcontracted workers, many of whom are home-based. And then we have what are called unpaid contributing family workers. So one thing this slide I will explain to you, in the official classification of status and employment, only five of those categories are there. Casual day laborers, statisticians classify them as self-employed, own account. There's no category. Industrial outworkers, statisticians classify them as own account, self-employed, no category. We're pushing in the 2018 discussion of the classification to include these categories to reflect the reality of work today. The percentage figures in the pyramid are what percentage of informal employment, non-ag, are in these various categories based on those regional estimates. And we don't have data for some of the categories. But you'll see that employers who hire others is a very small category. And own account operators is by far the biggest category. We know there's segmentation by sex, which is what I have there on the right. Top two categories, predominantly men wherever you look. Bottom two categories, predominantly women. And the middle two, a mix. We also know that average earnings go down as you go down the pyramid. And the risk of being from a poor household, we've done linked analysis where you have income data for households and labor force data. So the risk of being from a poor household goes up as you go down the pyramid. And wherever we've tested the model, we get the same results. So the linkages with the informal economy, we do a lot of research. We've just done a 10-city study on what's driving change in the informal economy. And you do find that it's not dualistic. The informal economy is directly linked to the formal economy in many backward and forward linkages. So many informal self-employed have informal firms as their, have formal firms as their suppliers or their buyers. And many informal wage workers are linked to formal firms, which could be their employer or which could be their contractor in a value chain that's subcontracted production to them. So there are multiple backward and forward linkages. In terms of formal regulations, there's a widespread assumption that the informal economy operates outside the ambit of the state. This is not quite right. The bullet tagline would be outside the protective arm of the state, inside the punitive arm of the state. So yes, informal employment operates outside the reach of many protective laws and regulations, including labor regulations. But not outside the reach of all state regulations. And certainly not outside the reach of state practice. In the 10 cities where we asked workers, what was the main driving force? And we ranked this through survey and focus groups, between sort of broader economic trends, supply chain dynamics, and the practices of the city and the policies of the city. The city ranked very high, or it's often very punitive policies towards them. So in fact, the state often uses its authority or abuses its authority to harass or penalize informal units and workers. In India, a country I know well, if you're a street vendor and the city has not given you a license or permit. And the last time Mumbai did that was probably 15 years ago, and they issued maybe 20,000 permits out of 250,000 street vendors. You were then subject to the Indian Penal Code. And the police will issue warrants, confiscate your goods on the basis of the Indian Penal Code. And the street vendors know exactly which laws of the Penal Code they're being charged under. I should also say that the state constructs opportunities for more powerful actors to impose costs on informal workers. And the waiving of labor regulations to entice investment in special economic zones and export processing zones is just one example. And then further, state policies and resources and incentives are really biased towards formal units and workers and against informal units and workers. Yes, five, okay, here we go. This is a very quick summary of findings from the Ten City study of how the market and the state download costs to informal workers. And I'll just stick with the costs imposed by the city on street vendors and waste pickers. Some of this is familiar, but I think it's worth repeating. Confiscation of goods, police demand bribes, evictions. There's one a day reported online in the English press. Arbitrary excessive fines and police beatings. And the same obtains for waste pickers who do the job of sorting waste and reclaiming plastic and metals and glass and cardboard for industry. So confiscations, demanding of bribes, chasing waste pickers away from their roots, police harassment, police beatings were all reported systematically across the ten countries, cities. So I'll end with informal employment, what next? And one is that we do have to try to reduce these decent work deficits in the informal economy. It's gonna be a very long term trajectory to have enough formal jobs that people will be absorbed. People are gonna continue to earn their livelihoods in the informal economy. And they need better opportunities. They need economic rights. They need protections, legal and social. And they need a voice. The motto of the International Coalition of Street Vendors is nothing for us without us. And that, I think, is shared. And there are organizations of these workers all around the world. And we need to reduce the state bias towards formal units and workers and against formal units and workers. I know Santiago has written about targeted schemes of social protection. And those are there, but they're rare. And what's there on a daily basis for these workers is the kind of harassment and confiscations. And we are proud that in Durban, South Africa, there was a victory in the High Court, ruling that the confiscation of street vendor goods is unconstitutional, unlawful and invalid. So there is a precedent setting case that we hope will be taken around the world. And then a plea to development economists, please integrate the informal economy into local economic development, into economic policies and plans. As long as they're stigmatized and left on the side and thought as to be a problem, how can they grow? How can they become more productive? They have to be integrated into your plans, your local economic plans. And just one example, if I may, my students did a study in Mumbai. I taught a course in the urban planning at Harvard. And they found that in one area of the big slum of Mumbai, there is a plastic reprocessing industry that generates half a percentage point of GDP of Mumbai. And 250,000 waste pickers collect the plastic along the route of the formal trucks. And there's no facility for them to do it. They have to do it against the odds. And they bring the plastic and they help wash and clean it. And it's melted into pellets and exported right away to China. The formal waste collection system doesn't contribute to this recycling and reclaiming at all. And these people are doing it at huge odds. We don't know how they transport the plastic to that industry. So we have to integrate them. And finally, a future vision for development economics from Ilan Bhatt, the founder of SEWA in India and the founding chair of WIGO, is we have to convince policymakers to promote and encourage hybrid economies in which small and large and formal and informal can operate alongside each other. And she reminds policymakers that they finally adopted biodiversity. Why not also adopt economic diversity and try to promote a more level playing field for all sizes of businesses and all categories of workers. Thank you.