Informal employment as a social determinant of health: A conceptual framework and research agenda accounting for context

Abstract

Most workers globally are informally employed, but our understanding of how informal employment affects people’s health remains limited. In this new publication in Social Science & Medicine, Amanda Aronsson (NTNU) and Tim Huijts (ROA) provide a new conceptual framework that explains how important the context at the meso- and macro-level is for understanding the health consequences of informality. Not only does attention to context allow comparisons to be made across settings despite heterogenous meanings of informality, but such an approach also enables more comprehensive explanations of when, where and for whom informality is harmful to health. We furthermore propose attention to the level of regulation and protection available to workers, as a strategy to analytically operationalize contextual factors. Based on this framework, we present a research agenda in which we suggest prioritized directions for future research that would contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how informality is linked to health.

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Amanda E. Aronsson, Tim Huijts. Informal employment as a social determinant of health: A conceptual framework and research agenda accounting for context, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 368, 2025, 117809, ISSN 0277-9536