7.1 Descriptive Statistics of Outcome Variables, by Worker Type

In contrast to the employment data, the CPHS provides household income and consumption data at a monthly frequency. For example, households visited in April 2020 report income and consumption for not only April 2020 but also March, February, and January 2020. Hence, household income and consumption are observed each month. The analysis of income and consumption thus uses a monthly panel of 4,632 households from October 2019 to August 2020.

The CPHS describes the employment arrangement of each employed individual as follows: (1) permanent, salaried; (2) temporary, salaried; (3) self-employed; and (4) daily wage or casual. Individuals are defined as informal if they are either daily wage workers or temporary salaried workers. Permanently salaried individuals are treated as formal workers.6

The analysis seeks to clarify how the pandemic affected these worker types differentially. The focus is therefore on the employment status of individuals during the last prepandemic wave of the CPHS, that is, December 2019. The employment arrangement of an individual is defined as a time-invariant individual characteristic, which is fixed at the initial December 2019 level.7 Doing this allows a study of the differential labor market patterns among workers who were initially employed in the formal sector rather than self-employed or employed as informal workers using the difference in differences event study methodology. Similarly, the income and consumption analysis categorizes households as formal, informal, or self-employed, based on the employment arrangements of the household heads.

Table 7.1 shows key summary statistics for each worker type in the balanced panel sample during the last prepandemic wave, that is, December 2019.8 Although all worker categories exhibit similar levels of employment, informal workers earn and consume a lot less than their formal and self-employed counterparts. The average per capita household income among informal workers is less than one-half the

TABLE 7.1 Descriptive Statistics of Outcome Variables, by Worker Type

Worker type Employed, % Per capita household income, Rs

Per capita household consumption, Rs Rural, % Women, % Completed high school, %

In high face-to-face industries, % Formal 79.01 10,195 4,879 17.2 17.9 82.5 49.3 informal 72.98 4,958 3,015 28.8 20.8 36.6 79.1 Selfemployed 76.61 7,321 3,640 30.2 10.5 55.3 50.0

Source: Statistics based on a balanced sample of 7,467 individuals and 4,632 households in the 7-wave balanced panel in december 2019. Note: Completed high school = passing the grade 10 examinations. high face-to-face industries are communication, education, entertainment and sports, hotels and restaurants, media and publishing, personal and professional services, personal nonprofessional services, post and courier, public administrative services, retail trade, travel and tourism, and wholesale trade. rs = rupees.