Key Details
The OECD’s Securing the Livelihoods of Informal Economy Workers in Times of Global Changes compares workers and households across developing and emerging economies. The figures below are averages across countries with available data, not estimates for India.
Informal work: An average of 68% of workers in the report’s country database are informally employed.
Automation: 35% of informal workers, against 19% of formal workers, hold jobs classified as highly exposed to traditional automation. AI-related automation exposure is more concentrated among formal workers.
Heat: The report estimates heat-related losses of 2.4% of working hours for informal workers, compared with 1.4% for formal workers, in its 2025 comparison.
Pensions: Across the countries analysed, 51% of older people receive a pension, whether contributory or non-contributory.
Informal Work Is Not One Kind of Work
The report’s central finding is that employment status alone cannot identify what protection a worker needs. Informal workers include low-paid people with little ability to contribute to insurance, better-paid workers who may be able to contribute, and workers employed informally within formal firms. Some households depend entirely on informal earnings; others have both formal and informal earners.
A low-paid worker facing unstable earnings may need a tax-funded protection floor. A worker with greater means may be able to enter a contributory scheme if enrolment and payments are practical.
The Threat Is Not Only AI
Much debate about technology focuses on artificial intelligence. The OECD finds a different divide in its sample: routine manual tasks put informal workers at greater risk from traditional automation, while jobs most exposed to AI-related automation are more often formal. These are measures of occupational exposure, not forecasts that the same share of workers will lose their jobs.
Ageing poses a slower-moving risk. Workers who spend much of their careers without pension contributions can reach old age with little income of their own. The report argues for combining contributory pensions with adequate non-contributory support, rather than expecting one scheme to cover workers with very different earnings histories.
Delhi’s Heat Evidence Reaches Beyond Outdoor Exposure
Extreme heat can reduce informal workers’ income through several channels at once. Research on Delhi street vendors and home-based workers discussed in the report links heat periods to inadequate shade and water, fewer customers or work orders, and time diverted to collecting water or caring for family members. Among the surveyed Delhi vendors, 96% reported a decline in customers during the heat period. This is evidence from specific worker samples, not a citywide estimate.
The report also describes a Self-Employed Women’s Association heat-insurance initiative in Gujarat covering 21,000 women workers. Payments are linked to a predefined heat threshold, offering one way to compensate for lost income. The OECD notes that such products still face questions about affordability and long-term financial viability.
The report includes India in its cross-country database, but the underlying Indian household survey dates from 2011–12. Those comparisons should not be read as a current estimate of India’s informal employment rate.
Policy Relevance
Earlier World Bank research framed extreme heat as a constraint on South Asia’s urban growth. The OECD report brings the distribution of that cost into focus: informal workers may lose income through heat exposure, reduced demand and unpaid care, often without the protections available in conventional workplaces. TPE commentators Shaoni Das, Megha Jacob and Sukanya Das have separately argued that workers are absorbing heat-adaptation costs through lost earnings and health risks; the OECD’s Delhi evidence illustrates that concern.
For India, the policy response cannot rest on heat warnings alone. Shade, water and safer working conditions matter for vendors and other workers in public spaces, while home-based workers’ exposure is shaped by housing and access to services. Income protection must also reach people whose earnings stop when work does. Over the longer term, pension design and skills support need to reflect the different circumstances of informal workers, rather than treating them as one group.
Follow the Full Report Here: OECD, Securing the Livelihoods of Informal Economy Workers in Times of Global Changes
Related TPE Coverage: Extreme Heat Is Becoming South Asia’s Urban Growth Constraint | India’s Informal Workers Are Bearing the Cost of Heat Adaptation