Jacques Charmes - IRD

Jacques CHARMES is an economist and statistician. Currently emeritus research director at the Institute of Research for Development (IRD), Centre for Population and Development (CEPED, University Paris Descartes-IRD), he was previously director of the Department of Social and Health Sciences at IRD, and professor of economics at the University of Versailles and at Sciences Po in Paris. His main fields of research focus on informality, labour markets, unpaid work, women’s economic participation and empowerment, and time use. He has been involved in the design and analysis of many labour force, living standards, informal sector and time-use surveys, especially in Africa, North and South of Sahara. He was involved in the drafting of the new international definition of the informal sector adopted in 1993 (15th International Conference of Labour Statisticians, ICLS), and of informal employment (17th ICLS, 2003), and the 2013 ILO manual on “Measuring Informality: a statistical manual for the measurement of informal sector and informal employment” as well as the OECD “Handbook for Measurement of the Non-Observed Economy” (2002). Author of world compilations on employment in the informal economy and its contribution to GDP, as well as on time spent in paid and unpaid work and related gender gaps (for ILO, UNDP-HDRO, UN Women), he is currently involved in several development projects across the world (Africa North and South of Sahara, Caucasus, Indonesia) on policies addressing the informal economy in reference to social protection and taxation. He recently published a synthesis of his works: “Dimensions of resilience in Developing Countries: Informality, Solidarities and Care Work” (Springer 2019), and edited the Research Handbook on Development and the Informal Economy (Edward Elgar 2020). He is one of the founding members of the international network WIEGO (Women in the Informal Economy : Globalizing and Organizing) created in 1997 by Harvard University, UNIFEM and the Self-Employed Women Association (SEWA) of India (www.wiego.org).

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