The Enterprise Survey of the Informal Sector (ESIS) is a product of the Enterprise Analysis Unit that measures the characteristics and activities of unregistered businesses. These informal businesses are everywhere in the world, though they are almost always missing from official records, listings of active businesses, and business-level surveys. Building on existing academic research, the ESIS is a rigorous survey that uses an adaptive, geographically based sampling method to fill this data gap. This page provides additional information on the findings, methodology, and coverage of the ESIS.
The indicators presented here provide a snapshot of the informal sector based on the Enterprise Survey of the Informal Sector (ESIS). All survey datasets are available from the data portal.