Employment Vulnerability and Earnings in Urban West Africa

SummaryThis article develops indicators of vulnerability in employment in seven economic capitals of West Africa and studies their links with individual incomes. Quantitative, distributional and qualitative analyses show that vulnerability compensating mechanism is mainly seen in the informal sector, in the upper tail of the earnings distribution and particularly in the circumstance of visible underemployment. Employment vulnerability is not compensated for the poorest workers in the private sector. Long “job queues” and weak institutional protection of workers may have reduced bargaining power in the formal sector.