Informal financial sector—measurement problems

The informal activities in different occupations are carried out by the Households/Household enterprises, the accounts in respect of which are masked in the Household sector accounts. The accounts of such enterprises need to be disentangled from the Household sector by recourse to other sources of data and results available from various surveys. Many of these enterprises do not maintain books of accounts for compilation of Sequence of Accounts (SOA), as envisaged in the System of National Accounts (SNA) 2008, as per which the Quasi Corporations (QC) engaged in manufacturing are to be covered in the Non-Financial Corporations (NFC), and those dealing with financial services in the Financial Corporations (FC) sectors. In the revised National Accounts Statistics (NAS) with base 2011–12, these are captured partially using mainly the results of the Surveys of unincorporated enterprises (SUE). The problems encountered in these compilations are detailed in this article with reference to the Informal Financial Sector. A methodology for improvement of estimates of value added by money lenders is also attempted. The importance of conducting a full fledged survey of Informal financial services is also highlighted.