非正规性与植物的生命周期（英）

Informality and the Life Cycle of Plants Furkan SarıkayaM. Nazım TamkoçJesica Torres Development EconomicsGlobal Indicators GroupJanuary 2025 Policy Research Working Paper11022 Abstract This paper documents the life cycle of formal and informalplants using five waves of the Mexican establishment census.Formal plants begin operations with three times more work-ers than informal plants and exhibit faster growth rates.Throughout their life cycle, formal establishments morethan double their size, while informal plants increase theirsize by only 77%. A general equilibrium model is developedto quantify the aggregate economic losses stemming fromthese growth rate disparities. In the model, plants grow through productivity investments, and informality emergesfrom incomplete enforcement. In equilibrium, informalplants exhibit flatter life cycle profiles to avoid detectionand taxation. Model parameters are calibrated to matchkey properties of plant size distribution and the life cycle ofplants in Mexico. Quantitative results indicate that a reve-nue-neutral full enforcement increases aggregate output andthe overall growth rate by sixteen and twenty-five percentrelative to the benchmark, respectively. This paper is a product of the Global Indicators Group, Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by the WorldBank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world.Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may becontacted at fsarikay@asu.edu, mtamkoc@worldbank.org, and jtorrescoronado@worldbank.org. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Informality and the Life Cycle of Plants* Furkan Sarıkaya†M. Nazım Tamkoç‡Jesica Torres§December 2024 JELclassification:E23,J24,L25,O41,O33Keywords:Informality,Life-cycle,Development,Productivity,Distortions 1. Introduction Hsieh and Klenow (2014) have documented that plants in the U.S. grow more over theirlife cycle compared to plants in Mexico and India.1,2Less developed countries also facewidespread informality.3This paper argues that informality, arising from incompleteenforcement, distorts incentives for growth over the life cycle.4Since tax complianceincreases with plant size, informal plants may optimally choose to keep operating atsmaller scales to escape detection. Hence, we study the role of informality in explainingthe life cycle of plants. We ask how aggregate economic outcomes such as output andplant-size distribution, as well as the life cycle of plants, would change if informalitywere reduced by improving enforcement or reducing the burden of formality. One of the key challenges in studying how informality distorts plant life cycles isthe limited availability of plant-level panel data containing information on registrationstatus. This study overcomes this challenge by analyzing Mexico’s census plant-leveldata from Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI). Thedata tracks plants over 20 years, from 1998 to 2018, and includes information aboutestablishments’ registration with different tax authorities. Therefore, unlike Hsieh andKlenow (2014), this allows for analysis of a balanced panel of registered and unregisteredplants. In our analysis, an informal establishment is a plant which is not registered witheither the central tax authority or the social security administration. In contrast, werefer to plants as formal if they are registered with either the central tax authority orthe social security administration. We first show that young formal plants are bigger interms of employment than young informal plants. Formal establishments in Mexicostart operations with 6.1 workers on average whereas their informal counterparts reportonly 1.9 workers on on average. Second, formal plants grow faster over their life cyclecompared to informal plants. While formal plants grow by a 136% during their lifecycle, informal plants are only 1.77 times bigger when old compared to young informalplants. In order to quantify the losses of informality from distortions to the life cycle growth of plants, we develop a one-sector growth model where both formal and informal plantsgrow by investing in their productivity. Our model is based on Guner et al. (2018) (GPVin what follows) which in tu